This is a longer take on what I wrote about a few weeks ago…

We’ve only just begun to comprehend the expanse of God’s love.

However, if we let the prayer of Paul (in Ephesians 3) work itself out in us, we will begin to receive the power needed to grasp the love that surpasses grasping. To know the love that surpasses knowing. To comprehend the love beyond all comprehension. To “get” the love that is more expansive and exhaustive and far-reaching and wide-ranging and all-embracing than we’ve previously known.

For now, we only know that love in part. But Paul’s prayer will be answered. We will one day be filled with the fullness of God – the God who IS LOVE.

What does that love mean for us and how do we find it now?

The comprehension of God’s love is not simply found through thoughts of grandeur and mountaintop experiences. Though God might meet us in our lofty thoughts and in our spiritual ascents — though we might feel closest to God there — they aren’t always the holy moments we think they are.

We often associate these experiences of separateness with holiness — being away from the world and disassociated from sin — but our holiness is not determined by being apart from our neighbor just as God’s holiness is not defined by his separation from the world.

The holiness of God’s love is realized down on the ground and in the shadow’s of the valley. He is, as the prophet Isaiah says, the Holy One in our midst. the holiness of Jesus is on full display in the crowds who clamor around Him. He is separate from them in that he is walking without sin, but he is not at all apart from them because of theirs.

He is holy because He can be the Savior among sinners. Becoming their sin and dying their death.

That is love. He is Love.

We believe God shows us this love by giving himself to the world so that the world might believe. So it must be that we will be filled with that love — and become that love — through the giving of ourselves and the receiving of those around us.

Down on the ground and in the shadows of the valley.

What will our relationships look like with that kind of posture toward our neighbor? The stranger? Our enemy? What will love to the fullest measure look like when we make eye contact, when we share a post, when we offer an opinion, when we see an opportunity to take offense?

The answer is found in the person of Christ. He is love to the fullest measure.

The love of Christ demonstrated in his life and in his death was constant and without condemnation. He invited those who considered him an enemy to share a meal. He supplied the needs of those who would reject him. He celebrated the sinner as she washed his feet. He died for those who pierced him.

Have we yet had the strength to suffer THAT kind of love? To receive that kind of love? To share that kind of love? To love that kind of love?

The width, the length, the height, and the depth of LOVE that Paul believes in for us will not be simply found in the expanse of solar systems and galaxies but profoundly found in “who is my neighbor” relationships.

The love between you and me.

The love between us and them.

And THAT is holy.

This is where the comprehension of the incomprehensible is possible. When the love that we barely know will one day be fully known.

It’s almost like all of this is more than we can ask or imagine.

“… I pray that you, being rooted and established 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, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭3‬:‭17‬-‭21‬ ‭