August 8

“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge…”   —EPHESIANS 3:17-19

In the continuation of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, he writes, “to know this love that surpasses knowledge.” Notice the paradox? How can we know something that surpasses knowledge? It’s important we understand if our dealings with God are purely on a rational level, a result of intellectual processing, we might understand a doctrinal position, but we will come to a point where our backs are against the wall. There are some things which have to go beyond intellectual reasoning.

Paul’s prayers are for things only God can give us, and here he is speaking about coming into experiential knowledge of the love of God. In Romans 5:5, he says, “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given to us.” This is something only the Holy Spirit does, and so it goes beyond the natural. Paul is saying there is so much we can know, and is praying that God takes us beyond that which is explainable to that which surpasses knowledge.

The following is a verse of a hymn found penciled on the wall of a tiny room in a mental asylum. It was written by a man afflicted with serious incapacities who had died in that room, and when they removed his body, they read on the wall:

Could we with ink the ocean fill, 

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade,

Then to write the love of God above,

Would drain the oceans dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky.

This was a man who knew what surpasses knowledge. We can’t allow ourselves to be content with a purely intellectual Christianity. The reason we pray is to move us beyond the natural, material and predictable world to a world in which God alone can work. And the chief characteristic of God is that He is love. Though we will never exhaust, nor fathom the depth of His love, we can, through Jesus Christ, remain rooted in it.

PRAYER: Dear Lord, I pray that in everything I do, I become more and more rooted in your love, and that it brings me into a deeper experience of You.

TO REFLECT UPON: How would I explain God’s love to someone who has yet to know Him?