Pause
“I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love.
With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself.”
Jeremiah 31:3
Let the sounds around you fade into the background of God’s presence.
Breathe deeply, whispering: Jesus, your love is everlasting.
Breathe out slowly, saying: Your love is unfailing.
Do this a few times until your mind and body are still.
Ponder
“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
Joe and I had been dating for 18 months when it came to me—I might just be in love. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Then one night he said, “A penny for your thoughts.”
“I think I love you...”
There. My heart laid bare before him. Beating like crazy as I awaited his response.
The silence dragged on.
Awkward... agonizing. Then the line I will never forget:
“All I can say is it doesn’t bother me that you feel that way.”
I felt rejected... deflated... vulnerable.
I’ve wondered so many times since...
Could this be how God feels when He whispers, “I love you...”
and we respond in awkward silence... or say nothing at all?
When God’s love doesn’t bother us, when it doesn’t confound us?
Love is the very essence of Christ’s being. It burns within Him, seeking expression.
He cannot hold it in. His love catapulted Him to earth...
...to walk among us,
to feel our angst, experience our pain,
taste for Himself our despair.
Then He laid down His life.
The love of God shines most radiantly from the cross where He bore our sins, paying a price we could never pay. There is no greater love.
His love is...
Boldly passionate.
Sensationally sacrificial.
Tenderly patient.
Stable and steadfast and utterly beyond comprehension.
How do we begin to know something God says is beyond understanding?
In Jesus’ final prayer to His Father before the cross, He spoke of His longing for us to be with Him... so that we could see His glory. Then, Jesus noted, the love that the Father had for Him would be in us, because He would be in us (John 17:3).
We know Christ’s love by knowing Him...His presence within us. We find assurance in His desire for us to see His glory. The glory of Christ—the beauty of His very being.
Exalted on high, Jesus yearns to give us Himself—
His wealth for our weakness,
His faith for our unbelief,
His purity for our shame.
God's love will ever be beyond our grasp—because He is infinite. Yet today and every day, as we fix our gaze upon Jesus, we can taste His love in increasing measure. We have eternity to pursue the length and height and breadth and depth—the ocean of God's unfathomable love.
Glorious quest. Joyful pursuit. The love that will not let us go.
Pray
“We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us.
God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”
1 John 4:16
To know God’s love is to experience His presence intimately. What does this quest look like for you?
To believe God’s love is to have complete and utter confidence in it. How might you grow in this?
To abide in God’s love is to feel more at home in it than anyplace else. What could make this your reality?
Write a prayer of longing.
Practice
For the next several days as you go to bed, and as you wake in the night, or in the morning,
express your desire to know and believe God’s love... and to abide in it.
Pay attention to how doing this changes things.