Introduction
John Ortberg tells the story of his sister Barbie and her favorite doll when she was growing up, a doll named Pandy. "When Pandy was young and a looker, Barbie loved her. She loved her with a love that was too strong for Pandy's own good. When Barbie went to bed at night, Pandy lay next to her. When Barbie had lunch, Pandy ate beside her at the table. When Barbie could get away with it, Pandy took a bath with her. Barbie's love for that doll, from Pandy's point of view, was nearly a fatal attraction.
"By the time I knew Pandy she was not a particularly attractive doll. In fact, to tell the truth, she was a mess. She had lost a good deal of her hair, one of her arms was missing, and generally speaking, she'd had the stuffing knocked out of her. But for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, in the way that kids sometimes do, my sister Barbie loved that little rag doll still. She loved her as strongly in the days of Pandy's raggedness as she ever had in her days of great beauty. Other dolls came and went; but Pandy was family. Love Barbie; love her rag doll. It was a package deal.
"Once we took a vacation from our home in Rockford, Illinois, to Canada. We had returned almost all the way home when we realized at the Illinois border that Pandy had not come back with us. She had remained behind at the hotel in Canada. No other option was thinkable. My father turned the car around, and we drove from Illinois all the way back to Canada.
"We rushed into the hotel and checked with the desk clerk in the lobby - no Pandy. We ran back up to our room - no Pandy. We ran downstairs and found the laundry room - Pandy was there, wrapped up in the sheets about to be washed to death.
John Ortberg then makes this observation: "The measure of my sister's love for that doll was that she would travel all the way to a distant country to save her. [Even though Pandy was more rag than doll, Barbie loved her with a love that made Pandy beautiful.] (Adapted from John Ortberg's Love Beyond Reason, p. 11-13)
I want to call our focus on a love that comes to rag dolls like us who are flawed and broken, bent and tattered, but made beautiful because of that love. I want to shine a light on the amazing love of God for us.
This morning, I want to unwrap this gift with you. And I ask you to ponder its meaning in your life until, by the Holy Spirit's help, it moves from head to heart.
Paul is a prisoner of the state when he wrote the amazing words for the Ephesians and for you and me. He is chained because he simply refuses to be quiet about Jesus Christ. He is paying for his allegiance to our Lord. But he does not complain or caution in what he writes. There is trace of self-pity or regret. Instead, we find the words of verses 14-19.
Don't miss this massive, unchangeable fact: You are thoroughly loved by God.
Verse 17 tells us that as a believer in Christ "you have been rooted and firmly established in love." There are three words that need to touch our minds and souls. The first is "rooted," which pictures you as a great tree, whose roots have penetrated deep into the rich soil of God's love. To be rooted in something means you are drawing nourishment from it, your life, your food, your water, that which sustains you and causes you to flourish.
I have a tree in my back yard which has been noticeably shifted by Hurricane Ivan, its root snapped beneath the ground. Spring beckons new life everywhere in my back yard but here on this skeletal tree. It shows no color, sprouts no bud because it is severed from the root. Just so, we who are His by faith in the Son of God are rooted in love, absorbing our life from the love of God. We are not dead tumbleweeds, tossed about by whatever prevailing wind comes along. Instead, we live, connected to our source of life and strength that lies beneath the surface.
Now add the second verb. You are also "firmly established in love," says Paul, and this time he uses a word from architecture. In Christ, you are like a building that has its pilings driven deep down into the bedrock below. You stand on a Rock. You are fixed to unbreakable love.
Combined, these two verbs convey the picture of endurance, of nourishment, of strength for the storms of life and solid perseverance. We are not fixed on the shifting sands of lesser foundations. We rest upon a steady love that surrounds us, making us durable and consistent. Our roots draw up the love God has for us all the time. We have been planted here by the Holy Spirit. We have been established here by that Master Builder. And because of this, we are stronger than the storms that beat upon our lives. Because God loves us, we are not consumers, but givers. We are not fearful, but courageous.
I. Love's true meaning
But now, let's add the most important word of all, the word "love." What exactly is this that we are rooted and grounded in? The word used here is "agape," which is the NT word for God's love for us and our love for one another. It is translated in our Bibles by the common English word love. But that just won't cut it.
"Agape" is the love-word for absolute, un-self-centered, brutal sacrifice. "For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16). It always involves giving away your life in some form.
"Husbands, love your wives, just as also Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her "(Eph. 5:25)
"Agape" is decision love. That is, it is love that is fixed, not in fleeting emotions or in the passion of the moment, but in the will. This is a love that is rises from the choice of the lover alone. The cause that beckons forth "agape" is never found in the object of love.
Which is why the translators of the Bible in past generations did not use the word "love" to capture the meaning of "agape." Instead, the used the word "charity." We don't use that word much these days, except to refer to those whose life and circumstances have made them indigent. "I don't want charity," we might say when receiving what we did not earn and cannot pay back. And yet, when it comes to the love of God, we are all charity cases.
C. S. Lewis picked up on this thought: "We are all receiving Charity," he wrote. "There's something in all of us that cannot be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill" as to expect that God would find something lovable in us. (Adapted from C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, p. 116.)
To be loved by God is an act of charity toward beggars and rebels. It is a pure gift, given to the undeserving and the unlovable. We don't provoke, trick, convince, earn, or win agape from God. "Look at how great a love the Father has given us, that we should be called God's children…" (I John 3:1)
So you can see this isn't the sentimental mush or physical buzz we often associate with love. It goes far beyond the trite expressions of love we use when we speak of loving where we live or loving the hamburger our favorite restaurant makes. It is a love that finds its ultimate definition in the cross of Jesus Christ, where the innocent Son of God takes the place of the guilty in this very room.
Listen to Romans 3: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His restraint God passed over the sins previously committed." (3:23-25)
What that means is that God presented Jesus, whose death, received by faith, absorbs God's wrath for you so that you are made right with God. And it was all a gift, a gratuitous and free act of charity for we, the lost. "Love consists in this, writes John, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation" (mercy seat, atoning sacrifice, that which removed God's wrath from us) "for our sins." (I John 4:10)
So when Paul says we are rooted like a great oak in love and grounded like a well-founded building on love, let the truth of what that means strike you. This is perhaps the most basic spiritual fact about your life as a believer in Christ this morning: You are loved by God. This is the air you breath, your food and drink, the ground beneath your feet.
In fact, God goes out of His way to let you know several important things about His love. For example, He wants you to know that He has loved you for a very long time - Eph. 1:4-6 tells us that He set His heart upon adopting you into His family before the world began: "[God the Father] chose us in Him (Christ), before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ for Himself, according to His favor and will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He favored us with in the Beloved."
He wants you to grasp that His love for you is the starting place of your Christian life - 1 John 4:19 tells us the straight of it: "We love Him because He first loved us." He wants you to recognize that His love is worked into every crevice of your being - Rom. 5:5, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us."
He also wants you to know that nothing can ever cause His love for you to cease. Rom. 8: "Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or anguish or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: Because of You we are being put to death all day long; we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than victorious through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord!" (Rom. 8:35-39).
Brothers, sisters - this is the most important fact that can be said of you, a fact that changes everything. Your inner being is always at flood tide with rush of God's love for you. It surrounds and saturates you all the time. There is nothing you can ever do to earn it, so there is nothing you can ever do that will stop it.
II. From head to heart: Experiencing the fact in the soul
Now this fact alone will bless you profoundly even if all it is to you is a fact. But Paul can tell you from experience that a profound shift takes place in your life when you move beyond the acknowledgement that God loves you to the feeling of your Father's joy over you. So in v. 18-20, he asks the Father to give you what it takes to make the jump from head to heart.
Paul "bows his knees before the Father in prayer, that you 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."
A. The conditions
There are two conditions to moving from head to heart.
1. You must want this
Verse 18 opens by asking that you "may be able to comprehend." The word for able describes focused effort that does not let up until the task is accomplished. In other words, this is not for casual Christians. If you are into quick fix Christianity, with instant discipleship, you'll give up too early. This calls for study and prayer, for lingering meditation and communion with God's Spirit and fasting.
2. You must hang out with fellow believers
The only way to comprehend the nuances of God's love for you is "with all the saints." You cannot lay hold of God's deep affection for you, His self-sacrificing tenderness, His passionate sympathy, or how He goes out of His way to express kindness to you - alone. So if you're a loner, you're not only weakening yourself, you're robbing other believers of your part in learning the heart of God for His own, and your missing out on that as well.
B. The mystery
What Paul says next is an attempt to gather into words something profoundly personal. When a man who is characteristically exacting in his language suddenly gets vague, we know we are dealing with something too deep for words. Verse 19 takes us to the edge when it speaks of knowing (lit., knowing through experience) "the Messiah's love that surpasses knowledge." Ever try to do that, to talk about something that goes beyond words?
Here is this professor of theology, the Apostle Paul, who studied deeply the implications of the cross, where Jesus became his substitute. He looked into the incongruity of how a sinner could ever be loved by a holy God. He plumbed the depths of how much it cost God to express His heart for us in giving up His only Son. He marveled at how long this love would last. Every discovery shook his soul. The best Paul can muster is talk about dimensions - "the breadth and length and height and depth" of God's love for him.
This is what the human heart craves. We all want to be swept away, to be loved in spite of ourselves, to be fully accepted, to be cherished, to matter to someone. We want to caught in someone's arms when we fall, we want someone to watch over us, we want to experience "a consummate love," to be enraptured in the lavish love of Someone who knows the truth about us, but will not turn away.
From your heart, would you sing the truth: "Oh How He Loves You and Me."