More than All We Ask or Think

MORE THAN ALL WE ASK OR THINK

Ephesians 3:18 … that being grounded in love, all you who believe may be able to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.

That Scripture holds the most boundless and unlimited promise of the unveiling of the Reality of the power of God’s love. 
It actually states that we can be filled with all the fullness of God! We are living in times when God is revealing (apocalypto) everything that needs to be exposed and to be seen for what it is, the good and the bad. One word describes what God is revealing – Reality.
When something gets exposed for what it really is we don’t have to guess anymore. That includes everything we see in the world around us, in politics, in culture, in religion, and most of all, in ourselves. What God wants to reveal to us about us is the Reality of who we really are as created in his image and as being transformed into his likeness. 

Becoming our true self is a gradual process, but that Reality can be certain and abiding if we make a deliberate and conscious movement of our hearts and minds towards the boundless spirit of God’s love towards us. We unseat our struggling false self (which doesn’t want to die!) and which is based upon a fearful defective idea of who we are. 
We have as it were two lions within us fighting to have us. One is the lion that the Bible talks about as devil, as the lion that goes about seeking to devour – the other is Jesus, the Lion of Judah – and it depends upon which one that we feed as to which one dies off or survives. We can progressively free ourselves from what darkness has told us regarding what we are and who we are, and we can enlarge the boundaries of our faith to believe God’s idea of who we are, and we become the partakers of an abundant life in God and of God. 
The limits of this enlargement are yet to be realized in this earthly life – always within reach but never fully grasped by anyone (except Jesus). But Paul still urges us to pursue this fullness of God’s love within us, giving us his own pursuit for this as an example to us. He says ‘not that I have already attained this or am already perfect, but I press on to this goal to make it my own: forgetting what lies behind I reach forward for the prize of this uppermost invitation of God in Christ Jesus’ (Philippians3 :12).
It matters not how old we are but how sincere and willing we are, and transformation is inevitable. Nothing but our own apathy and limited desire limits this realization. Resisting this work of the Holy Spirit causes us all great and needless inner suffering.

What is the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love?
If we can picture these measures as vertical and horizontal dimensions in space, we would see the Reality of our life in the present moment - that God’s love is actively moving upon every aspect of our lives.

Breadth is the Reality of what happens in the horizontal dimension of your world.
The Length is the Reality of the timeline of your life, which is also a horizontal dimension with your past behind you and your future in front of you.
The height and depth are the Reality of God’s love acting upon you in a vertical dimension – from Heaven above and down to you into the depth of your heart of faith.

BREADTH
Imagine yourself positioned in the very centre of these vertical and horizontal lines and
as you rotated slowly around in a 360 degree turn you would be seeing the breadth of what is going on around you in your world. That represents all of the living creatures and non-living objects of God’s natural creation – the trees and rocks and oceans and the sparrow that falls from the sky, all born out of his love – the beauty and the wonder of it all, that we appreciate and care for. 
And it represents all the people, the humanity that he loves, all created in his image. 
But we also acknowledge the many activities of those many people that can be grievously unlovely in their pursuit of pleasure and power. And all of that unlovely is a reflection of Mankind’s general lack of understanding of God’s love. Our reaction to the unlovely and our contribution to the unlovely is also a measure of our understanding of God’s love. We can be so aware of the unlovely of all of this to the point that we are not aware of the movement of God’s love in the midst of it all (for God so loved the world…). 

Our comprehension of the breadth of God’s love is a condition of awareness, a direct perception, not an opinion or an idea. His love is the Reality, and all that unlove is a reality that is now being exposed more than ever. 
Where are we? Do we pour God’s love into our world or add to the unlove? 

It is only to the degree of our comprehension of the love of God toward us that we can comprehend his love for the world and his desire for our partnership with him in that redemptive love. We are not to confuse our partnership with God’s love for the natural world with an ideological commitment to saving the planet from extinction, nor are we to struggle with a self-conscious human compassion that fails to right all the wrongs of this world. Instead, we enlarge the sphere of God’s love into the breadth our inner life and we enlarge the sphere of our influence of his love into the entire breadth of our personal world. The ultimate Reality is that God’s world is a love born and love driven world, and unlove can be overcome by God’s love.

LENGTH
As you remain in the centre of those dimensions there is a horizontal line that comes from behind you and through you and goes out in front of you. That is the timeline of your life, with your past behind you and your future in front of you – and the present moment with you. This timeline is a dimension that can be filled to abundance with the love of God. Unlove towards us in our past has scarred our souls and wounded our spirits. And our unloving reactions to others and to ourselves because of this mistreatment can block our pathways forward in believing in God’s love toward us. 
The reason that we were scarred, or wounded is because we felt alone in that experience, and vulnerable and unprotected. If someone loving and strong had been there with us and holding us close, we would have been strengthened by that support and even endured the mistreatment with some distress but without as much harm. The fact is that someone loving and strong was with us, but we didn’t know it. Jesus was there all the time. 

The beautiful reality is that right now the Holy Spirit can reveal this Reality to us. He was there all the time and is here now and he felt every sensation of our personal hurt and pain as he did with Jesus and he can take us from that past moment into the present moment of faith and reveal Jesus who heals that pain and brokenness. Our brokenness is a reality of life that we can admit to without feeling shame because we are never cut off from God’s love – it has always been there but we didn’t know it. Brokenness does not mean a lack of wholeness, but it means that in the disappointments of life we can now learn to trust God to give us hope for the future rather than be stuck in the hopelessness of not knowing and of doing things our way. That becomes our present Reality of his strength in our weakness, and his peace in our struggles, as we become more and more filled with ‘the fullness of God’. Our times and seasons are in his hands - He holds the future

HEIGHT  
This is the vertical dimension of the Reality of God’s love coming upon us from the Heavens, and our faith that reaches up to meet it. 
Psalm 36:5 Your love oh Lord reaches to the heavens Your faithfulness stretches to the sky Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains. Your justice flows Like the ocean's tide.
The Bible tells us to set our minds on things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, and not to let our hearts and minds get bogged down with things that are on earth. (Colossians 3:1).
As we open ourselves to this Reality of his love flowing towards us, his tide flowing in and our faith rising up become one movement of love, and the grace of God can keep this at the flood.The strong tide of the transcendent life and love of God will inevitably rise within us and lift us into a consciousness which opens and expands us to receive its fullness. 

DEPTH
This is the vertical dimension of God’s love plumbing the depths of our heart - and as much as we are able, we surrender to that love, willing for that love to lay hold of us. 
This is different to trying to work up in our own strength an action of love towards God, which is such an elusive and confusing activity.
The surrendered self does not act, but it first receives and then it can act from there. 
Our only struggle is to enter into that rest of surrender which creates space for the ocean of God’s Being to fill it. This such a difficult path – but God initiates it. 

God’s loving and purposeful thoughts towards us are unmeasurable compared to our fleeting loving and purposeful thoughts towards him. How precious toward me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! (Psalm 139:17). 
This is not opinion or mere human perception – this is the Reality of the operation of the love of God. As we live in this atmosphere of Reality, we will, in fact, in our everyday selves become more real. So let us return to the original Scripture and quote the first section only ‘to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. This is all about the unimaginable concept of an ordinary person being filled with all the fulness of God!

It is made possible by the fact that Jesus has made his own life available for us to live in, while he himself lives within us through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This love becomes the ground of our being and the motivation for our doing. But our doing does not compare (again) with the wonder of his doing, which is described now in the second section of that original Scripture. ‘Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us. 
If we can see this picture of every dimension of our life within God’s love - everything that is going on in the world around us right now, everything that can be healed from our past, and everything that awaits us in the future – all poured out from above and swelling our waiting hearts of faith – then we will comprehend with humble simplicity all that we need to know about our life - More than all we ask or think.