How Deep, How Wide, How High Does it Go?

And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.  Ephesians 3:18-19

In our day to day lives, sometimes it’s hard to remember the core of our beliefs and what they really mean to us.  We plow along at work, we have chores, we face painful situations, we hear disturbing news from around the world of people being persecuted for their faith.  Life is overwhelming, sometimes we feel as though we are merely moving from one crisis to another.

All of these things sometimes cause us to forget how deeply loving our God is – how much He cares about every hair on our head!  We suffer, others suffer, and we ask WHY?  What can our response be?  Our response is to try to remember and to try to actively pursue that love that is freely given to us.

We don’t understand the depths of God’s love, we really don’t.  His capacity to love the broken-hearted, the downtrodden, and even those who always make a mess of their lives (which we all do from time to time), is so hard for us to grasp. But we can feel it.  We can know it.  We just have to remind ourselves.  We do this by reading His Word, by loving Him first, and by loving and serving others.  I have never felt more love in my heart than I have on those Saturdays as I was leaving the New Orleans Mission after ministering to people who are homeless.  If you want to really know love, BE love.

We will never know how much God loves us until we arrive in heaven.  We will never be able to love like He does — but we have to try.  That’s Jesus’ most important commandment (Matthew 22:37-40); it’s one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22).  We are commanded to practice the love of God until it becomes perfect.  And as we continually practice loving like Jesus does, we will find peace and joy in all that we do.