Go

Grace Baptist Church

Contact Us

  • Phone: (239) 772-1400
  • Email: 
  • Mailing Address: 1300 Ceitus Terrace, Cape Coral, FL 33991

 

 

Power to Know Unknowable Love

Power to Know Unknowable Love

Feb 28, 2016

Passage: Ephesians 3:14-21

Preacher: Jared Longshore

Category: Sunday Morning

Keywords: cross, gospel, knowledge, love, power

Detail:

Pastor Jared Longshore teaches on Ephesians 3:14-21 with a message entitled “Power to Know Unknowable Love.” God’s love might be His most widely acknowledged attribute but it may also be the most misunderstood. What does “God is love” really mean and what is the practical outworking of that biblical truth? The present passage answers these questions and more.

God’s love, in that it “surpasses knowledge,” seems unknowable. Yet Paul’s prayer, as he wrote to the Ephesians, was that the readers would know this love. It will take the power of God to bring these two, seemingly irreconcilable facts, into harmony. First, we see that God’s love is exceedingly great. It is apparent God has love for the world and His creation. He, after all, brings sunshine and rain upon the just and unjust alike. And yet this love does not negate a deeper, special love for Christians. To this point in the letter Paul has been reviewing the outworking of that love, a Christian’s spiritual journey being saved and set apart by God. It is no wonder Paul prays that the Ephesian saints “might have strength to know this love of Christ.” Only the children of God can really know this love. God empowers His children, those who have come to the Lord Jesus Christ in repentance and need, those, who having come, find their need for this life and the next fulfilled.

Having first described this love as exceedingly great, Paul next describes it as coming from the Father. No longer are believers strangers and aliens to God. They have been reconciled to the Father and are members of the household of God. It is no accident that the Bible calls God the Father of Christians. It has been the Father’s plan, before the foundations of the world, to send His Son in love to save those whom He has chosen.

Paul provides one last attribute of God’s love; it surpasses knowledge. Despite the remarkable abilities of the human mind, we see here that God’s love passes knowledge. Yet Paul prays that the Ephesians might actually know this love. How is that dichotomy reconciled? Obviously knowing this love requires more than intellectual assent (v. 19). It is something we come to understand with all the saints (v. 18) so that we “may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Our knowing this love, however, remains, in large part, a work of God. According to vss. 20-21, it is God who empowers His children to know His love. Christians may not be able to know or comprehend the love of God on their own, but with God’s empowerment they surely can.

This empowerment is actually available to all. Yet it is only by coming to Christ, taking His work on the Cross as a work done on their individual behalf, repenting of their sins, and by faith accepting God’s gift of salvation, that availability of that empowerment actually comes to a person. Today is the day for you to receive that power. Come to God through Christ.