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Nov 28, 2010

Love's Reach

Passage: Ephesians 3:16-21

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Postcards from the Front: A Wartime Romance

Category: Ephesians

Keywords: love of god, prayer, church

Summary:

Prayer for the people of God must involve praying for a greater capacity and experience with the love of God. This message examines some of the things that keep us from experiencing God's amazing love as well as what can help.

Detail:

Love’s Reach

#10 in series “Postcards from the Front:  A Wartime Romance”

November 28, 2010—Ephesians 3:16-21

Today’s passage is the continuation of a prayer we began to study (and hopefully pray) last week.  Last week we saw Paul praying that Christ would “dwell” or “be completely at-home” in the hearts of the Christ-followers he was writing to.  We took a look at some different “rooms” of our hearts and what Christ might want to do in us in those “rooms” in order to be more “at-home” with us. 

      That prayer is foundational to the next prayer Paul will make for God’s people. If Christ is not living in/dwelling in/at home in our hearts, then there is very little possibility that the next part of this prayer will be answered any time soon in us. 

The next part of the prayer has everything to do with THE greatest thing any of us can grow in which will bring a wide range of good things and good relationships in our lives.  Any guesses what that is?  (LOVE)

So let’s read the next part of the prayer and then ask God’s Spirit to actually fulfill this prayer in us in the days to come. 

Ephesians 3:17b-19

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Before we get too far down this trail, let’s nail down some working, accurate definitions for “love.”  How many different kinds of love can you think of you might experience in the course of a month?

  • Romantic love?  One def: Romantic love is when the chemicals in your brain kick in and you feel an emotional high, exhilaration, passion, and elation when you and your lover are together.  [http://marriage.about.com/od/loveandromance/g/romanticlove.htm]
  • Brotherly love?  “A kindly and lenient attitude toward people.”
  • Familial love?  Affinity or natural affection felt between members of a group bound by common ancestry or blood ties, or through family unit.
  • Unconditional love?
  • Godly love?
  • Parental love.
  • Patriotic love

Paul uses 2 metaphors here to talk about what you and I are to be firmly established in, namely love. 

  1.  An agricultural/botanical metaphor—“rooted in”
  2. An architectural or construction metaphor—“established in” or literally “foundationed-upon,” speaking of building a building such as a house or other building on a solid foundation. 

I must admit that I’m better acquainted with the first metaphor than the second.  I know what it means to be well-rooted in good soil. 

ILL:  Two different trees at the lake—the one on the rock that has little root…and the one on the hillside that withstands terrific storms.  The difference has to do with the soil. 

APP:  We all choose (often subconsciously) the kind of soil in which we will “plant” the roots of our own strength.  If you were fortunate to grow up in a home where parents, imperfect as they were, showed you love, made home a safe environment and a place where you could be imperfect, fail and try again, then you got started in some pretty good “soil” as a seedling. 

      Of course, the older you grow, the more difficult it is to uproot your thinking patterns, change the soil and put down solid roots in real, genuine love.  But it’s not impossible. 

ILL:  Sandy—grew up in a pretty emotionally needy, critical, environment but decided to plant herself in different soil at about age 16.  She found a loving group of peers in a church and started to sink down roots into genuinely loving relationships with healthy adult Christians. Result:  she’s now even able to love me! J

All of us sitting here choose every day of our lives where we will try to sink down roots?  We choose the soil.  We choose the people…the things…the ideas…the gods where we will try and draw nourishment for our life.  God invites us every day to sink our roots into Him.  Whatever the thirst or nourishment need, His love is the only truly unconditional love that we’ll find in life.  His love is the only perfectly balanced disciplining-love we will know in life.  His is the best nurturing-love that we could find from anyone in this life. 

      God will let us go off and try to find it in less stable “soils” like friendships or marriage or parents or church or a job or a house or a hobby.  Those things and people may be actually good for us and they may nourish us to some degree.  But unless the love of God is tilled into even those soils, they will eventually run dry of solid nutrients.  We’ll be disappointed and disillusioned and frequently find ourselves dry and worn out with even the best of people. 

  • Psalm 17:7--Show me the wonders of your great love, you who save by your right hand those who take refuge in you from their foes.
  • Isaiah 38:17—

In your love you kept me
   from the pit of destruction;
you have put all my sins
   behind your back.

  • John 17:26—(Jesus is praying to the Father), “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
  • Isaiah 54:10--Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the LORD, who has compassion on you.
  • Romans 8:28-29--For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The second metaphor Paul uses is of getting the foundation solid in a building. 

ILL:  Space Needle, 1962 World’s Fair—This 605-foot tower was built at a remarkable pace. The huge 30 feet deep and 120 feet across underground foundation required 467 cement trucks an entire day to fill the hole, the largest continuous concrete pour ever attempted in the West. Once completed, the foundation weighed as much as the Needle itself.  The perfectly balanced top level restaurant rotates with just a on1.5 horsepower electric motor.  The center of gravity for the Space Needle is 5 feet above the ground.  It was built to withstand 200mph winds.  The highest it’s ever had is 90mph.  It cost $4.5 million to build in 1961 and $20 million to renovate in 2000. 

[Factoid:  In 1966 11-year-old Bill Gates, now Microsoft chairman and co-founder, won a dinner at the Space Needle restaurant offered by his pastor. Gates had to memorize chapters 5, 6 and 7 of the Gospel of Matthew, better known as the Sermon on the Mount, and he recited the sermon flawlessly.]

Love, of all possible foundations, is probably one of the stronger ones anyone could choose in life.  People can endure unimaginable difficulties as long as they know someone deeply committed and loving is waiting for them.  Just as any POW who survived a Japanese or German POW camp in WWII.  Ask any unjustly condemned criminal who had to serve time for a crime they never committed. 

Love is extremely powerful.  But it is not irresistible. It does not conquer all.  In a world of human freedom and free will, love cannot break through where individual will does not permit it.  

WHAT RESISTS THE POWER OF LOVE?

To put it another way, how can two people, deeply in love, begin marriage with such passionate love for each other and, years or even months later, not want to spend another minute together?  Something obviously happened to love somewhere, right? 

QUESTION:  So, when it comes to experiencing the love of God, what do you think are the major “spoilers” or destroyers of a love relationship with God?  (Groups?)

The Bible gives us several clear-cut answers to that question. 

1.)    Competing loves: 

  1. Jonah 2:8--Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them. (NIV 2010 Ed.)  It’s like taking a narcotic that dulls you to the real world and robs you of the best sensations and reality…all the while you are thinking you are getting the best out of life when, in fact, it’s killing you. 
  2. Mt. 6:24 says “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” 
  3. I John 2:15--Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
  4. Loving the praise of people more than God:  John 12:42-43—“Yet at the same time many even among the leaders believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they would not confess their faith for fear they would be put out of the synagogue; 43 for they loved praise from men more than praise from God.”

2.)    Little experience with forgiveness:  Luke 7:47—Jesus’ words to the sinful woman at the Pharisee’s house after she had washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.  Jesus called out the Pharisee for not treating him with even the most basic respect accorded a guest by washing his feet with water and wiping them with a towel nor greeting him with a kiss or anointing him with oil.  “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”

3.)    Diminished meaningful engagement with believers who “spur us on” to love—Heb. 10:24-25-- 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. 25 Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

This is precisely what Ephesians 3:18 recognizes as well.  There is a lot of the love of God that must be experienced in relationship with other people.  It cannot be known in isolation or withdrawal, specifically from the people of God. 

      “And I pray that you…18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ….”

      Notice how Paul recognizes that it is in relationship with others in this family of God that we will be able to begin to grasp the amazing love of God.  There is something vital, essential that living in relationship with others in our spiritual family that grows our capacity for the love of God.

Sharing in Groups: 

  • How/when/where have you experienced the love of God through his church, his people, in the most life-transforming ways?
  • If you could help God’s people learn to love each other/people in one particular way, what would you choose?  [What’s keeping you from doing that right now?]

Group Discussion: 

How do you take a person from being completely selfish, self-absorbed and spoiled to one who really loves other people sacrificially?  What grows or nurtures our capacity to love? What changes us from selfish brats to loving brothers and sisters in Christ?

God has several different “schools” he has designed for us in which to learn about the nature of love. 

Learning to live love “in community.” 

  1. His first place is the FAMILY.  There is something very love-building about healthy families (not to be confused with “perfect” ones…of which there are none). 
    1. It starts with childhood.  Every one of us is born selfish to the core. We demand immense amounts of time, energy, attention and love from our parents.  If there are older siblings, we demand it of them too.  If no other siblings come along, then the tendency for that center-of-the-relational-universe-syndrome is even greater. 

Before the era of artificial birth control, families were almost always quite a bit larger.  To be an only child or one of just two or 3 children was pretty much the exception.

Q:  How does living in a larger family force you to be less selfish, less self-focused?  You have to learn to share, learn to compromise, learn that the family routine isn’t just about you; it’s about you AND another handful of energetic, talented, needy siblings.

      For about 18 years, you are stuck with the same people, stuck learning to love despite the same faults and the same oddities of personality and behavior day after day, year after year.

  1. Next in the major learning-to-love category would be what?  MARRIAGE, right?  Two supposedly mature adults begin to try and live life together.  It doesn’t take long before you find out just how self-centered you are.  For those of you married, how many of you made it through the honeymoon without the ugly specter of your selfishness raising its head?  The first month?  Year?   It’s a challenge for two people who are used to spending their money their way to begin to use money as a means of expressing love. 

Time:  It used to be yours to schedule as you wished.  Now you learn that time can either be a great expression of your love…or a terrible revealer of your selfishness, depending on how you choose to spend it…or sacrifice it. 

Emotional energy:  Until you get married, you don’t realize how much emotional energy living in a love relationship can take day after day.  Sure, there are lots of emotional benefits too.  But there are those times…days…perhaps years…when your spouse is emotionally needy (and sometimes selfish).  Now you are forced to grow in things like patience, compassion, kindness, gentleness, self-control.  (Sounds like a list I’ve heard before!?) 

Mundane daily stuff:  Where not picking up after yourself was just your choice before, now it is evident how selfish and thoughtless it can be.  Where you were able to completely determine your daily routine and schedule, now you realize you must begin to think about someone else’s sleep needs or conversational needs.  Where single you could engage in as many hours of hobbies and leisure activities as you wanted with a thought to their impact on someone else, now to do so can easily display how self-occupied we are.  And just when you thought you were getting a little more loving and a little less selfish, guess what happens? 

  1. You have a BABY!  Nothing like a completely helpless, completely self-centered, crying, colicky little bundle of poop waking you up every 2-3 hours to remind you how selfish you can be about something as basic as sleep.  Now you’re tired all the time AND you hardly have 5 minutes to do with what you want.  This little offspring of your “love” is sapping your love-tank and family budget about as fast as you can say “dirty diapers.”  J
  2. And then there are 2…or 3…or 5 or 10! 

Living “in community” in a relatively healthy family is the first and certainly one of the best places to learn about love. 

Isn’t this why God designed the CHURCH?  It is meant to be a spiritual family where relational challenges turn naturally selfish people into loving sons and daughters of God.  The problem today with saying that in our consumer-driven society is that many self-proclaimed Christ-followers ditch this or that church… or church in general… when God pushes them to grow beyond being a consumer-Christian to being a caring-Christian.  Living in any family, including the family of God, takes constant growing in love for others.  It takes growth and work in love to be able to grow together in Christ. 

  1.  Learning to love…experiencing love…not only comes from learning to live in community with other love-needy people. Doesn’t it require difficulties and being engaged in the painful experiences of life with others?   

Isn’t that a bit of a paradox—learning about love when things are hard?  Don’t trials assault our sense of being loved?  Don’t they cause us to question even more whether or not God is really loving…or at least loving US at the moment? 

ILL:  As a pastor, I see people in some very painful, very trying circumstances of life.  I watch them try and navigate the waters of sudden loss--the loss of health, the loss of a loved one, the loss of employment or friendship or faculties. I see people experience the pain of family breakup.  I watch them try to make sense of financial ruin or emotional breakdown. 

      As I try and walk with them through these ‘hard things’ of life, I never know what way it is going to affect them.  I’ve known people who I thought the slightest difficulty would be enough to push them over the edge and I’ve seen them come out stronger, more in love with God and more at peace with life.  I’ve known others who appeared to be pretty strong people yet when the heat was on, they became angry, cynical, doubt-filled or grudge-bearing people. 

      We’re all going to have pain in life.  Yes, some will have extra freight cars full of it.  Some periods of life will have what seems like WAY too much pain at one time.  It’s probably safe to say that all of us will have more than we would like.  But it is those difficulties, those hurts, those wounds, those afflictions of life that can make us more loving people.

Why else would Paul write in Romans 8 what is probably one of the top 3 treatises in the N.T. about the love of God?  Remember the context of Romans 8? 

  • In vs. 15 we’re reminded that it is the Holy Spirit in us that causes us to cry out “Abba”…Daddy…when we’re in need.
  • In vs. 17, Paul talks about sharing “in Christ’s sufferings” as heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.
  • Vs. 18—Paul says “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”  Then he goes on to talk about how the whole creation is groaning along with us until our ultimate redemption—the resurrection of our own bodies.
  • Paul calls us to hope in the midst of unrealized hopes in vss. 24-25.
  • He talks about how the Spirit helps us in our “weakness” by interceding for us with “groans that words can’t express.” 
  • Then in vs. 28 we have the almost unbelievable promise that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him….”

Listen to how this chapter of deep struggle, trials, suffering and pain ends talking about LOVE:

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:

   “For your sake we face death all day long;
   we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

ILL:  One of the earlier painful periods of my life was the year we spent in language school in Costa Rica.  I felt like my whole life was being dismantled one word at a time.  ALL my supposed competency in ministry and maturity in Christ seemed to crumble into nothing but dust.  I felt like a total idiot every day, all day.  I was angry, depressed, discouraged, fearful and defeated. 

      Yet every day the language school held chapel.  So many days, I would sit there listening to someone challenge us to one thing or another in our Christian experience. Those were not the people who ministered to my soul.  But I will never forget listening to the language school director, a big, husky man about 60 years of age.  Just about every time he shared the Word of God, he shared it through his own tears.  He had obviously been broken by some experience of life.  Yet that brokenness ministered to my spirit like nothing else. 

      I remember how God began to speak to my heart about how his love for me was not based upon how well or poorly I was doing in language school.  It wasn’t based on how much ministry I could do for him.  It didn’t fluctuate towards me depending on whether I was feeling good about life or myself or whether I was feeling awful about both.  God began the painful experience of really teaching me about hid love that didn’t depend at all upon me. 

Q:  How have the difficult, painful experiences of life revealed  God’s love to you?  (Group sharing?)

Let’s go back to this passage one more time. 

Ephesians 3: 17ff

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Without trying to read too much into the poetic language of verse 18, let’s think for a moment about those four dimensions of the love of Christ—width, length, height and depth. 

  • When do we need love that is “WIDE”?  When we talk about people being “narrow,” what do we mean?  Limited vision; limited appreciation for others; narrow-minded; prejudice; bigoted.  Narrow people can’t appreciate diversity or races or cultures or personalities or ages.  Narrow people demand others be just like them.  Yet we live in a world of greater diversity and breadth than any of us are comfortable with.  And we serve a Savior of whom we will sing a new and eternal song with the words, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” (Rev. 5:9)  Our God’s love is so wide it encompasses the whole world (Jn. 3:16).  When do we need the “wide-love” of Christ?  The smaller our world becomes…the more diverse…the more multi-racial and multi-cultural. 

A people filled with the love of God will always have more love for more of the world than people who don’t know God.  That’s why we send teams to Nicaragua.  That’s why we embrace kids from all over the world in our families.  That’s why we help settle people from all over the world in Spokane.  That’s why we cross economic and educational and age boundaries to learn to love each other in God’s family. 

Where does God’s “wide” love need to push out the narrow walls of your thinking?  Your acceptance of others? Your family or circle of friends or life?

  • When do we need love that is “LONG”?  When the road gets long?  When we get old?  When a trial doesn’t end?  When some temptation won’t stop?  When your strength is sapped?  When your vision and dreams have evaporated?  When you have a long road ahead of you…and when you’ve already traveled a longer road than you ever anticipated.  Love never fails.  Prophecies will cease.  Tongues will be stilled.  Knowledge will pass away.  But love never will…never.

Q:  What long road needs the LONG LOVE of Christ in your life right now?  What seems unbearably long right now?  Will you ask God to show you his love on that road, love that is yet longer still?   

  • When do you need love that is “HIGH”? 

How about when you’re on the mountain top…or higher—“cloud 9”?  Do you need the love of Christ when everything is beautiful and wonderful in life?  Even the most wonderful moments of life are not what they were meant to be without the love of Christ.  It can be your wedding day or you dream vacation of a lifetime; without the love of God, even the best will have a hallow ring to it. 

How about when you’ve got a mountain that seems too big to climb? 

Psalm 121—

1 I lift up my eyes to the hills—
   where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the LORD,
   the Maker of heaven and earth.

It is that journey of climbing when you have no more strength, when you cannot see the summit, when your whole body is aching and crying out for you to “STOP!” and give up that  we need to know the love of Christ.

  • Finally, when do we need to know how DEEP Christ’s love is?  When we’ve sunk to the bottom in our sin.  When we’ve slid down the slippery slope of rebellion farther and faster than we ever dreamed possible.  When we’ve hit bottom and it feels like life has knocked the wind out of us.  When all we can do is lie on our back looking up…whether from a hospital bed or a nursing home or a jail cell or an alleyway or an empty house.  That’s when we need to “know” experientially just how deep Christ’s love goes. 

As Paul says, this is a love that “surpasses knowledge” because it is a love that is as large as God himself.  Our infinite God with his infinite love will always have more facets of his love to show us even after we’ve been with him 10 trillion years!  

COMMUNION:

Some of the early church fathers saw the 4 points of the cross in this poetic statement of Paul about the love of Christ.  Whether Paul had that specifically in mind when he penned this text is doubtful.  But that is not a bad reminder to us. 

      Whenever we see a cross, it should remind us that God is trying to communicate his love to us in height, depth, width and breadth.  As the old saying goes, “How much does God love us?  He loves us THIS much” (arms outstretched like a crucifixion).

      Whenever we come to the Lord’s Table, the Communion Table, it is to be a reminder of just how great the love of Christ is for us.