Before moving on to todays’ blog, I was going to add a post script to yesterdays’, but then it seemed that we needed more than a postscript. That in fact we needed at least another day, to focus some more, on thanking God for His amazing love. I believe it is so strongly on Gods’ heart, in this season, that His people should know the depth and quality of His love, because He is forming a bride who knows how much she is loved, and who will therefore be able to return that love.
Many beautiful hymns have been written about Gods’ love over the years. They often spoke of the love of God as being like a huge ocean. For example ‘Here is love vast as the Ocean’ and ‘Oh, the Deep, Deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless free, rolling as a mighty ocean, in its fullness over me’.
Today, I believe, God is releasing fresh revelation about His love through many of the worship songs being written at this time, and my post script to yesterdays’ blog was going to be some of the words from Jonathan David Helsers’ song ‘Find Me’. It’s an expression of his longing to know that vast ocean of love deep within.
‘Find me grateful, find me thankful, find me on my knees……,
‘till the breath of your hope fills the depths of my soul, and all I know is I’ve been found by love’.
Paul too had a passion, that the Christians around Ephesus would grasp how big the love of God was towards them. He knew it would take supernatural revelation, even for those first century Christians, and so he prayed a wonderful prayer for them.
‘I kneel before the Father ……… 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-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God’. Ephesians 3:17-19
Wow, Gods’ love is beyond anything we can imagine, and in grasping something of its’ dimensions, we may become ‘a body wholly filled and flooded with God Himself’ Ephesians 3:19 (from the Amplified Bible). This is clearly more than just ‘head knowledge’ or intellectual assent.
So, where does the power to grasp this love come from? The answer is through the Holy Spirit Himself. Paul, writing to the Romans , in the context of trials, says ‘Hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us’. Romans 5:5
I personally love the AV version of that verse, which talks of the love of God being ‘shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost’. When I think of the word ‘shed’, I remember what happens when a lorry ‘sheds’ its’ load on a motorway. It depicts to me, a total release of all that the lorry was carrying.
So today, let us continue saying ‘thank you Jesus, that you really, really love me’ and then add – ‘and thank you Holy Spirit, that you will show me how big that love is, as I open my heart to receive from you. I thank you, and invite you to ‘shed’ all that you are carrying of the love of God for me, into my heart today. Amen.
