Get A Grip

When we lived in Atlanta, a part of our church was made up of folks from Korea. They had their own worship service, their own culturally appropriate ways of being the Church, even their own minister. The parents of our Korean minister were quite old and spoke zero English. Yet, they maintained as many of their cultural routines as possible and one of those was coming to the church building early every morning to pray. The father, who had a heart condition, would sit in one section and the mother in another.

One Monday morning I arrived to the office early and had to go to the auditorium to retrieve the Bible I’d forgotten the day before. It was still dark outside and I hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. While I was behind the pulpit looking for my Bible, they came in and started to pray. And they were completely oblivious to my presence. So I had two very old Koreans, one of whom had a heart condition, praying in a dark room they thought was empty. But it wasn’t. And for all I knew, they are praying something like, “Speak to me, Lord.”

I was genuinely worried that if I spoke up, at least one of them was going to go meet Jesus right then. So I just stayed crouched down behind the pulpit and waited. And listened to their old, frail voices. Their prayers seemed very earnest and emotional and sacred. Very holy. And I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

A passage in Ephesians 3:14 – 21 is a little like that. For one thing, it’s a prayer. For another, parts of it are hard to understand. But the whole thing feels very holy. Especially this part: And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 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. 

Paul prays that the Church will have the power to grasp. To appropriate. To seize something in a forceful manner. The word describes the power of a strong grip. The thing Paul prays that we will grasp is the love Christ Jesus has for us. So why would we need the power of God to comprehend the love of Christ? Because, as he says in vs. 19, it is a love that surpasses knowledge.

That’s a hard thing for modern folks to hear. Our culture is built on knowledge. We know more than we’ve ever known and what we don’t know is one Google search away. But Paul is telling all us rocket scientists, engineers, attorneys, theologians, educators, and accountants that the love of Christ is beyond us. Still, some of us think we know the limits of Christ’s love. We think we found it.

Some of us think we ventured past the reach of Christ’s love. We’ve gone too far, we’ve been gone too long, we’ve wandered into some darkness so deep that the love of Christ could never find us.

Listen to Paul’s prayer: I pray that you may have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

Some of us think that because we’ve committed the same sin so many times – that particular sin that just seems to have our number, the one that gets to us every time – that we are beyond Christ’s ability to embrace us, forgive us, restore us.

I pray that you may have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

Some of us think we have hurt too many people, caused too much damage, that we have left so much relational flotsam and jetsam in our wake that there is no way Christ can clean up the messes we have made.

I pray that you may have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

The love that Jesus has for us is deeper than the Challenger Deep – the deepest part of the ocean. Located in the Pacific near Guam, it reaches a depth of over 36,000 feet. If you sank Mt. Everest there, it would be covered by over a mile of water. The Challenger Deep does not present a challenge to the love of Christ.

His love is as high as the heavens above us. The space probe Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977, almost 40 years ago. Currently, it is 12 billion miles from the Sun and will encounter its next star in 40,000 years. Voyager has not yet reached the limits of Christ’s love for us. That’s why we need the power of God to comprehend the love of Christ.

Whether you speak English or Korean – whether you are young or old – whether you are hanging in there spiritually or barely hanging on – the love of Christ reaches you.