‘Graspable Love’
- Feb 27
- 6 min read
We have, over the last couple of weeks, had an insight into knowing God’s power better!
I want us to look at another text referring to God’s power, but as a transition to one of the greatest subjects and indeed experiences we can and need to have as Christians, that is, knowing the love of God better!
Our Text Ephesians 3:18,19 says: “may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.”
Let’s pray
Father God, the width, length, height, and depth of your love is beyond my knowledge and understanding. I pray for the power to grasp how much you love me and the whole world. Thank you for the revelation of your love to the depth of my heart. Lord, please help me to grasp it again, to grow in your love and then to love others as you have loved me. Amen.
Paul reveals two very distinct aspects of Christ’s love in our lives. One aspect we can ‘understand’ (v18) and one we won’t be able to fully understand, it’s ‘too great’ (v19). But we can and need to ‘experience’ it!
Here in verse 18, the Greek word used for power means ‘an enabling’ to be extremely able and to have full strength/power in that enabling.
So, Paul is asking Father God to empower the believers with an enabling power in their inner being. The kind of power implied here involves the power to accomplish things, an active power to believe, pray, serve, know, rejoice, hope, overcome, witness, and so on!
We read in Colossians 1:11: “strengthened with all power according to his glorious might.”
Have you known His enabling power? Have you been released to know and experience and go deeper in glorious things in Christ through it?
Behind the scenes of an Arizona circus, Bobb Biehl started chatting with a man who trained animals for the film industry: “How is it that you can stake down a ten-ton elephant with the same size stake that you use for this little fellow?” I asked, pointing to a baby elephant who weighed three hundred pounds. “It’s easy …” the trainer said. “When they are babies, we stake them down. They try to tug away from the stake maybe ten thousand times before they realise that they can’t possibly get away. At that point, their ‘elephant memory’ takes over and they remember for the rest of their lives that they can’t get away from the stake.”
People can be like this sometimes! Perhaps when we were younger, some unthinking, insensitive, unwise person has said, ‘He’s not very good’ or ‘She’s not a leader,’ or, ‘They will never make it,’ and what happens? It’s like a mental stake put into our minds. When we’re older, we are still held back or tied down by those inaccurate one-sentence ‘stakes’.
Today, good news!
You and I are capable of much more than we realise through the 'enabling power' of God in our lives.
God loves you and I so much, He doesn’t want us to stay where we are. He wants us to grow in grace and knowledge of His Son, Jesus.
Tim Keller once said, “God sees us as we are, loves us as we are, and accepts us as we are. But by His grace, He does not leave us where we are.” He then says, “The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.”
Note the text Ephesians 3:17-19, “And I pray that you ... may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp...”
He prays for "power to grasp", a phrase with two verbs.
The first ‘power’ means, "to be fully capable of doing or enabled to do, experiencing something, be strong enough."
The second, "grasp", involves the imagery of chasing someone and seizing them, or used figuratively, to "understand, grasp, learn about something through the process of inquiry."
How can we be made capable, strong enough? Simply, we need to have a deep, living relationship with the One who has all the power. This comes from being "rooted and established in love" (v17).
If we are not firmly and deeply grounded in the things of God, we will always find it difficult to know Him better.
When I was in school (I know it was a long time ago!), my worst subject by far was French (now you’re thinking it’s one of those stakes that I need releasing from!). I thought I worked hard enough to understand it, to grasp it, but despite my efforts, my grades in French were propped up by all my other grades! On reflection, I didn’t enjoy the subject so I didn’t put all my effort into it. I did not seize (grasp) the opportunity afforded me.
May I say, it requires spiritual attention and a disciplined effort so that our grasp of Christ’s immeasurable love becomes a deep, continuous, personal experience.
Paul uses the Greek word for grasp often.
Take Philippians 3:12 for instance: “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold (grasp) of that for which Christ Jesus took hold
(grasp) of me.”
The bold words ‘take hold’ and ‘took hold’ are just one and the same word in the Greek - katalambanō.
Isn’t this a powerful image though? Paul says he's simply pressing on with all his energy to take hold of that for the reason Jesus took hold of him.
Now, how about starting today, not only with this thought, but with a desire to do the same knowing we have the ‘power to grasp’ the love of Christ.
The “grasping” is also to do with the mind, with our intellect. It's realising how wide and long and high and deep is the extent of His love and the distance God went to redeem us, and then appropriating it, seizing the whole aspect of it, the experience of it, and the life contained in such love.
It’s to do with truth dawning again and the mind seeing and appreciating the LOVE God has shown us. Do you see it? Look at the Cross of Calvary and the sufferings of the Son of Man. Do you see it? Do you get it? Do you grasp it? It was for YOU He gave His life. He who knew no sin became sin!
Pause for a moment!
What’s stopping you and I grasping it afresh again today?
God LOVES you more deeply, personally, passionately, and truly than you could ever imagine. He meets all our needs, fills all our voids, right down to our deepest desires. It's a love that captures the heart and soul in a way nothing else can; a love so deeply real and personal it can hardly be imagined, but it can be ‘grasped’.
Imagine today, you and I can 'grasp' such a love of God "that surpasses knowledge."
It’s immense, 'vast as the ocean' (as the first song said); it knows no boundaries in its abundant, limitless flow, and yet God makes it 'graspable.' He doesn’t reduce His love to make it understandable, but actually enlarges our ability supernaturally, by His Spirit, to experience it more and more. Wow!
Ours is a faith that expresses the mystery, the glory and the graspable love and presence of God. Hallelujah! Yet, if the truth is known, we find we’re the opposite to this and seem to experience it less and less.
Ephesians 3:18-19 is not a prayer that we might love Christ more, although we should. Rather, Paul is praying that we might better grasp Christ’s incalculable, immense love for us.
Think about the whole aspect of the ‘graspability’ of God in Jesus, and then allow the Holy Spirit to reveal more and more of all that God is. Wouldn’t it be wonderful through the work of the Holy Spirit to be enabled to discover more of the reality of all that Jesus is in His love towards us!
The love of Christ is a central element of Christian theology. It’s an all-important thing. But how easy it is to lose sight of the love of Christ, or just lose it!
Please note, ‘lovelessness’ is very serious, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).
Yet, the love of God still fits. Even in broken and messed up lives.
Where are you in your relationship with Jesus? You love Him a little, but long to love Him more?
God’s love for us is greater than any of our rebellion toward Him.
Today, we can, and indeed need, to know something more of His great, fathomless, graspable love.
I have read a few things of God’s love for us today, and often in prayer find I struggle to grasp the extent of His love. But then I read something in His word that opens my eyes a little more and see God’s extravagant love. It’s just joyful.