The love of Christ

Part Part 3 - Power to Understand

Ephesians 3v14-18

11^th December 2015

As we've seen, Paul begins his wonderful prayer in Ephesians 3 by saying:

Ephesians 3v14-18
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
And I pray that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ

This power depends on being rooted and grounded in Christ's love. It's based on our personal relationship with Him. And it's a gift. We can't just choose to grasp the size of Christ's love. We need God-given power to grasp it. We can only receive it by revelation.

Don't feel guilty because you haven't fully grasped how great Christ's love for you is. Pray for the power to grasp it! Pray for revelation! And we can choose to put ourselves in situations where it's easier to receive revelation - such as prayer, Bible study and corporate worship.

Paul must have had a lot of that power - a lot of that revelation. The persecution, beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks and everything else he went through never made him doubt Christ's love for him. And he prays that we receive the same power to grasp how much Jesus Christ loves us. And I pray that you will have power to know, certainly, deep down in your heart, that Jesus Christ loves you.

I don't often talk about Greek words, but the word translated "grasp" here is katalambano. Actually, the second half of that word, lambano, means "grasp". The prefix, kata, can have different meanings, but here it means "down". So katalambano means "grasp down" - really grasp, or grasp deep down, or grasp with our hearts as well as with our minds.

You can do as much theology as you like, but it's only by the power of the Holy Spirit that we can grasp the love of Christ in our hearts. It would be good to pray for each other, that we truly grasp the hugeness of the love of Christ for us, in our hearts. That Christ may dwell - all the time - in our conscious and subconscious thoughts and emotions. Please don't strive to believe Jesus loves you. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you how much he loves you.

Paul's experience proves that the fact that we're suffering doesn't in any way mean that God doesn't love us. He knew more suffering than most of us, and he wrote this letter from a Roman prison.