“I pray that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power in the inner man through His Spirit, and that the Messiah may dwell in your hearts through faith. 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.
Now to Him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us–to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
-Ephesians 3:16-21.
–>and to KNOW the Messiah, Christ Jesus’, love that SURPASSES KNOWLEDGE
Lately, I’ve been praying for God to give me power to comprehend more of His love. Without His power given to us comprehend it, we can’t ever really wrap our minds around it.
WHY would we want to understand more of the love of God?
So that we may be FILLED. No space empty. No lack or wanting for anything MORE, no more searching or aching or feeling empty anymore.
–>and filled with ALL the FULLNESS of GOD.
God is infinitely and dimensionally unfathomable in my finite brain. The fullness of God could fill the universe. Paul is praying for us to be filled with THIS fullness that comes only from the infinite GOD!
This black hole in human hearts that aches for meaning and fulfillment and satisfaction is gaping wide and tearing at us. So we STRIVE to fill it with ANYTHING: working our lives away, consuming alcohol or drugs to have a temporary good time or drown out pain we have felt, with the love of a man or woman who also are searching to fill this bottomless hole inside their hearts. The list is ENDLESS of things we idolize or run after to find fulfillment.
And it is insanity. We take the time and energy to pursue EVERY OTHER THING on this created earth instead of the Creator we were made to know and belong to and be in relationship with. I heard a worship song once that said: “everything else is a drug.” And this is such TRUTH. Everything else we try to pursue is only a quick fix, a way to somehow forget this ache we have for a little while. And all the time, the God of all who Created us is waiting, standing at the door of our hearts knocking. (Rev. 3:20) He’s waiting for us to realize EVERYTHING He’s created and put around us exists to point us to Him, exists to wave us down and get our attention and help us realize we were made for HIM. All these good and beautiful things on the earth were never meant to be the end. It’s all for Him, all pointing to Him.
So I just want to say, if you’re empty and feel purposeless and like you are searching for SOMETHING to fill your soul, you will only find it in God.
You will only be fulfilled by the very FULLNESS of GOD Himself, He Himself taking residence up in Your heart and life and dwelling WITH you. He created You with these hungers and thirsts so that they might be met. But they are ONLY met in Him. CS Lewis explained this perfectly for me in Mere Christianity:
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.Some aches and longings can’t be met in this world and won’t be because there is something beyond this physical world meant to fill it.”
My advice (coming from someone who has been a frequent runner to the multitude of these other things): STOP RUNNING. Stop running to these empty things of the world that don’t last and tell you lies and keep you searching. Your search can end.
Humbly ask God to help you understand all of this. Stop running to everything BUT Him and run TO Him. You’ll never know if He is good and true if you don’t try to get to know Him yourself, to ask Him to help you taste and see His goodness for yourself. Ask the His Holy Spirit to bring you to truth, and He will.
Your emptiness can be FILLED by the missing element in you, and in all of us, that is knowing God personally. He invites us ALL to this through faith in His Son, Jesus, who bridged the gap between the One True Holy God and sinful humankind and took the punishment and just wrath for our sins that we might be able to now approach God clothed in Jesus’ righteousness. This righteousness He simply gives us if we take hold of it, knowing it’s our only hope of freedom and the only way to KNOW this perfect Creator we were made to walk with both now and forever.
“But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of the Messiah.” -Ephesians 2:13
This is the Gospel: “The death of Christ is the wisdom of God by which the love of God saves sinners from the wrath of God, all the while upholding and demonstrating the righteousness of God in Christ.” -from Desiring God by John Piper
[This long rant of my recent learning is over. 🙂 I am now in SWAZILAND, Africa with rare access to wifi, so please STAY TUNED for more updates on last month in Zimbabwe and a little glimpse into what we’re doing this month for ministry!
My ever faithful readers, friends, and family, I love you and appreciate you so!!]
