“I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know the Messiah’s love that surpasses knowledge, so you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” [Ephesians 3:17b-19 HCSB]
Paul’s prayer for his beloved Ephesians was that they would become rooted in love, and that they would be able to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
If there was ever a prayer we should pray, it is this one. If there was ever a prayer God desires to answer, it is this one. Help me Father to know this love of Christ that surpasses everything.
Praying this prayer is dangerous, however. It will cause us to see ourselves as we are apart from grace, and that is not a pretty sight. It will cause us to sense the unworthiness of our lives and the shallowness of our love. It will cause us to ponder our commitment to truly loving God with our entire soul, mind, and being. It will drive us to a choice – do we really want to grasp how wide and long and high and deep Christ’s love is? If so, it must become our passion.
Passion. We speak of the Passion of Christ, a phrase you will often hear in this Easter Season. It means the hunger and thirst present in Jesus that made the Father’s will greater than His own. Christ’s passion for God’s will drove Him to the cross, to execution, to death, to the grave. It consumed everything He was, it prejudiced everything He did.
It is that kind of passion that we are choosing when we pray, “Help me Father to know this love of Christ that surpasses everything.”
