Friends, let me first say how honoured I am to worship with you today and to express my thanks to your senior minister Andrew Stirling for the invitation to share God’s Word with you. And also let me wish you happy Valentines Day! Today is the day that lovers renew their commitment to each other, usually involving food or romantic gifts or flowers or especially… chocolate!
Now when Dr. Stirling asked me to preach and told me it would be on February 14, on Valentine’s Day, a text of Scripture immediately came to my mind, It’s that phrase found in verse 18, in the middle of Paul’s marvelous prayer for the spiritual growth of the believers in Ephesus. It’s the part of that petition where Paul prays that the Christians there might have the power to understand “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”
That phrase always surprises me, because it seems to put together two things that are usually different, in my experience. The act of measurement, (measuring the breadth and length and height and depth of things) is a task I usually associate with the work of people like builders or architects or surveyors. It has to do with physical properties, with tangible realities, with measurable qualities. But love on the other hand, love is something I associate with emotional reality. Love, we say, is a feeling that creates a relationship, love is what moves poets to write sonnets, love is what motivates people to perform an act of passion or sacrifice or heroism.
So I wonder, what does the song of a lover have to do with the science of a surveyor? What relationship is there between the blueprints of the builder and an act of compassionate service? What do measurements like breadth and length and height and depth have to do with Christ’s love?
Well, when it comes right down to it, it has everything to do with it. Friends, these words of the apostle are more than just poetic license or a preacher’s exuberant wordiness. When Paul writes about these various aspects of Christ’s love, he’s doing more than simply creating a lovely turn of phrase. He’s describing the most profound dimensions of God’s compassion for you and for me.
Paul is praying that Christian believers in Ephesus – and you and me -- might be able to comprehend the love of Christ in all its dimensions. It’s as if Paul is inviting us to take a long, expansive look at the universe around us – to the limitless sky above our heads, to the limitless horizons on every side, to the depth of the earth and of the seas beneath us, and then says, there, the love of Christ is as vast as that.
What, then, are the dimensions of this incredible love that Jesus Christ has for us? Let’s think about each one that Paul mentions for a few moments. First, let’s think about the length of Christ’s love.
Now when you put it that way, maybe Paul makes sense. You and I talk about the length of love, too. We celebrate it. How many of you have celebrated with a couple who’ve been married 10 or 20 or 30 years? A few years ago, I went back to visit my parents when they celebrated 60 years of married life together.
Now 60 years of marriage is quite a length of love. But I wonder if anyone here knows the world record for the length of a marriage? What would you guess? 65 years? 70 years? 80 years? Well in fact, the world record for the length of a marriage according to the Guiness Book of World Records is 87 years. 87 years! That’s a long time.
But do you know something? It’s nothing compared to the length of God’s love for you. Because in Ephesians 1:3 and 4, Paul writes, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For He [that is, God] chose us in Christ before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.”
Now tell me, based on the simple teaching of this one verse, when did God choose you? The answer’s pretty clear, isn’t it? God chose you, says Paul, before the creation of the world. So, if you want to know about the length of God’s love for you, the first thing to know is that it is longer than all recorded history. In fact, it reaches back beyond history into eternity.
For it was there, in eternity past -- before time even began -- that God chose you in Christ. It was there that God decided that everyone who believed in Christ and received Him into their hearts by faith would be holy and blameless in God’s sight. And that decision, says Paul, was the beginning of the length of God’s love.
But it is not the end of it. For the love that God has for you and for me will stretch on, Paul writes, past the end of history, and into eternity once more. For nothing, Paul writes in Romans 8, “nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nothing, ever!
So when Paul prays in Ephesians that we might know the length of God’s love in Christ for each one of us, he’s really saying that insofar as you and I are able to understand eternity, we might know that eternity itself is the only way to measure the length of God’s love for us. And that, dear friends, is an endless measurement in both directions. That’s how much God loves you!
Now what about the height of God’s love? The clue this time is found in Ephesians chapter 2. Because in chapter 2, verse 6, Paul reminds us that “In our union with Christ Jesus, God raised us up with him to rule with him in the heavenly world. God did this to demonstrate for all time to come the extraordinary greatness of his grace in the love he showed us in Christ Jesus..”
Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates that verse:
God-took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.
So once more, let me ask you. Based on what Paul writes in Ephesians, how high is God’s love for you? How do we measure that? It’s as high, Paul says, as Christ’s exaltation beside the throne of God the Father in heaven. As a preacher once put it, “The height of God’s love for us is the height to which God promises to take us.” And in Christ, God has placed us right beside him, as his adopted children as God’s sons and daughters, in a seat of glory and privilege and authority… with all the time in this world and the next to celebrate the riches of God’s grace.
How high a position of privilege and honour has God given us? Dr. William Barclay tells the story of the little boy back in the days of the Roman Empire who was watching a great victory parade make its way through the streets of Rome. In these victory parades the army would march triumphantly past the cheering spectators, and at the centre of it all was the Roman emperor, riding a mighty chariot. Well, this little boy, who happened to be one of the emperor’s own sons, was watching the parade from the sidelines. But when the emperor’s chariot came into view, the boy bolted from his place in the crowd and made a dash for the chariot. And just as he approached the chariot, a Roman legionnaire saw the boy and held out an arm to stop him, telling him to get away from there. But the boy, with a twinkle in his eyes, looked back up at the legionnaire and said: “He may be your emperor, but he’s my father.” And with that, the boy jumped up onto the chariot, as his father made room for him to share in the victory parade.
Dear friends, in Christ, God has raised us up right beside himself – in a seat of victory and privilege and authority as his own adopted sons and daughters. That’s how high the love of Christ takes us!
Now what about the depth of Christ’s love? We can measure this dimension of his love from an intriguing verse in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 9. There Paul writes of how our Lord Jesus Christ descended down “to the lowest depths of the earth” (4.9). Now that phrase doesn’t mean that Jesus went underground like a Nova Scotia coal miner. It’s the Bible’s way of saying that God the Son journeyed to a far country; he traveled an unfathomable spiritual distance, descending from his eternal glory in the heights of heaven to live life as a human being here on the earth.
So for a third time, let me ask you. How far does this passage say Jesus was willing to descend to express his love for you? He was willing, Paul writes, to descend as far as he could go, from the heights of heaven, to the depths of the earth. That’s the miracle you and I are celebrate every Christmas, the incarnation. The very presence and life and fullness of God poured into human flesh in a baby in Bethlehem named Jesus.
But of course, the real humility, the real condescension of the incarnation only began there. For not only did Jesus descend from heaven to earth to be born. He descended still further to find us when he chose in his lifetime not to be hailed as a king – which he had every right to do -- but instead, he humbled himself and became a servant of all. “I am among you,” Jesus said to his disciples on the night before he died, “as one who serves” (Luke 22.27).
And our Lord Jesus became a servant to sinful humanity; he humbled himself even to the point of death on a cross for you and for me, even though it was our sin that put him there!
In the final analysis, it’s the cross that most fully expresses the depths to which Christ was willing to go to show his love for us. Because, of course, at the cross Jesus descended still further -- he descended from life into death. And in some miraculous way, the Old Testament psalmist seems to have foreseen the depths to which God’s love would go to save us. “Where,” he writes in Psalm 139, “where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, behold thou art there, and if I make my bed in Sheol, [in the place of the dead], thou art there also.”
You see friends, there is nowhere so deep that God’s love cannot find you. There is no point in your life when you have sunk so low that Jesus’ love can’t come and redeem you. The depths of God’s love are deeper than your deepest disappointment, deeper than your deepest embarrassment, deeper than your deepest failure, deeper than your deepest sin. That’s what Paul means in Romans 8 when he affirms that “neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39). Or as the hymn writer once put it, “O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free.”
But there is one final measure of the love of Christ, according to our text. And it is the breadth, the width of love. How wide is Christ’s love for us? The clue comes from the very same chapter as the sentence we’re studying this morning, in Ephesians 3:8 and 9. For there Paul writes, “I am less than the least of all God’s people; yet God gave me this privilege of taking to the Gentiles the Good News about the infinite riches of Christ, and of making all people see how God’s secret plan is to be put into effect.” (Good News Bible). This secret plan, Paul goes on to explain, is the mystery of God’s love in Christ.
And so once more, for one last time, let’s pause to ask the obvious. According to Ephesians 3:8 and 9, how wide is God’s love? It is wide enough, says Paul, that God has called him to help everyone see the plan of God’s love in Christ. And that is wide indeed. For you see, “all people” includes me. It includes you. It includes all us gathered here in this sanctuary this morning, and all of the people of Toronto, including those who haven’t yet heard or experienced the love of Christ for themselves. It is wide enough, in fact, to include not only the people around us but the whole world. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son….”
And his love is even wider than the whole world that we know. For it includes not only the physical world, but the spiritual world, the world of all faithful people from all times and all places. That’s why Paul prays that we may have the power, “with all the saints,” with all of God’s people, here and in heaven, to grasp the dimensions of Christ’s love.
And at this point let me say something that should be obvious to us, but in our individualistic culture, we are so prone to forget. Where, primarily, are we meant to grasp and experience and come to understand Christ’s love? We grasp it, says Paul, “with all the saints.” Although the love of God is profoundly personal, it’s never something that I privately possess apart from others. We can’t really know what love is all about when we live in splendid isolation, but love is revealed to us in the context of relationship – relationship with God and with other human beings.
Love is revealed to us in the context of relationship. That’s one of the very deepest truths of the nature of God – that the one true God is a community of three persons existing eternally in self-giving, mutual love. God the Father and the Son and the Spirit are a community of love, and our life together as God’s people, as the body of Christ, as a church, should reflect that kind of intense, relational love.
John Wesley once put it like this. “God knows nothing of solitary religion… No man [or woman] ever went to heaven alone.” The Christian Church has its faults, of course – we’re only too aware of that! We are far from what we ought to be. But we are meant to experience the love of God “together with all the saints,” in the fellowship of the Christian church.
I’ve said all these things about the various dimensions of Christ’s love. But Paul concludes with the most astonishing statement of all in verse 19. Because in verse 19 he prays that we might know a love “that can never be fully known” (Good News Bible); a love, says Paul, “that surpasses knowledge.” In the final analysis, Christ’s love is bigger than our ability to comprehend or understand.
Friends, here is good news! How long is Christ’s love for you? Longer than the length of eternity. How high is it? As high as the heavens to which he wants to carry you. How deep is the love of Christ for you? As deep as the depths our disappointments and fears and failures. For Jesus was willing even to die to demonstrate his love for you. And how wide is Jesus’ love? Wide enough to embrace not only you, and not only me, but all of us in this church and the entire world around us and all of God’s people from all times and all places.
Each one of us is within the reach of Christ’s loving embrace today. That’s the secure, rooted foundation we have in him. What are we left to do?
Well, in a sense we don’t have to do anything. We can simply let the reality of these words wash over us. We can let the truth of this good news penetrate our hearts, and embrace this good news as the gospel truth, for that’s what it is. To open ourselves to the wondrous, incalculable love God has for us, and claim the gift God offers, and respond with praise and adoration to an awesome God whose love is so unlimited, whose grace is so amazing.
Every one of us is within the reach of Christ’s loving embrace today. Thanks be to God! Amen.