Well, hopefully you got the memo that this Tuesday is an important day, especially men. This Tuesday is Valentine's Day. How many of you already knew that? Okay, that number of hands going up is a little bit alarming. Tuesday's Valentine's Day, so maybe don't wait until like Monday night to make a quick trip to Walgreens to try and buy chocolates. Think about what you're gonna do for Valentine's Day. But I was thinking about Valentine's Day, and I was curious, like, this has gotta be big business, right? Somebody's doing well off this, and indeed, that's the case. Every year, Americans spend over $20 billion on Valentine's Day. That averages out to around $164 per person, which I'll be honest, Rachel's not here, but don't tell her I wasn't planning on spending that much. Just didn't seem to be really super responsible to spend that much on roses and all that. 151 million cards more than likely will be exchanged, will be bought and given and then probably filed away in the circular filing cabinet. As we think about this week, as we think about Valentine's Day and love and romance, I think we all recognize that our culture's understanding of love and the Valentine's idea, it's kind of sentimental and nice and fun, but it doesn't really measure up to the ultimate measure of love, which is what we encounter in this text. By the way, I did not plan the calendar to be like, hey, the Sunday before Valentine's Day, we'll talk about God's love. It just happens to be what's in our text, which I think is pretty awesome that that's how things land. But I think it's entirely appropriate that today we reflect and meditate on God's love for us. You see, in our world today, people tend to take our puny human understandings of love and then try to sort of impose those back on God. Do you ever hear someone say, a God of love would never allow an earthquake in Turkey or a God of love would never condemn people to eternity in hell. We take our idea of fallen human sinful love. We say, well, God's gonna be like that. When the Bible actually turns that paradigm on its head to say, your human understanding of love is defined by what God is. We love because what? He first loved us. God is love and it is because God is love that we are called to love one another. And in our text today, Paul is praying for the church at Ephesus that they would have a deeper understanding of Christ's love. Now, that's an interesting thing to pray. Like, why does he do that? Verse 14 starts off for this cause, I bow my knee, and he goes through these requests. He's not just like, let me insert a prayer randomly in the middle of my letter and fill it with some flowery language that people will be like, oh, that's pretty. That's not his goal. The for this cause links this up to what he has been saying in the letter of Ephesians. So what has he been saying? Well, chapter one, he walks through all the blessings we have in Christ. Chapter two, he talked about the fact that we were dead and now we're alive. And then at the theological heart of the letter, the end of chapter two, he says, God's done a really awesome thing. He has taken Jew and Gentile, these groups that would normally be at war with each other. and He has made them into one new humanity. That's pretty stunning to take groups that have alienation and hatred and animosity and God's like, I'm making them one. There's unity in the church. And as we saw last week, this is the mystery, the once hidden, now revealed secret plan of God to bring this about that Jew and Gentile would share together in the same body, in the same inheritance, in the same promises. That is, theological reality, that is spiritual reality, that is what God has objectively accomplished at the cross. But I think we all understand that in the practical day-to-day realities, It's easy to be kind of annoyed by other people, right? Like how do Christians get along? Like if we're going to worship Jesus and love Jesus together, we need some kind of a glue to hold us together. And the glue that is going to hold us together is God's love for us as individual Christians that then fuels our love for each other. So in the larger scheme of things, what Paul is saying is God wants the church to have unity for believers to get along, no matter their differences in ethnic and historical backgrounds, to have real unity together. And that's only going to be able to happen when we comprehend how much God loves us. This is not just sentimentality, be like, God loves you, have a great day, but God loves you. And that in turn will fuel and enable you to walk together in unity and love to each other. The word love shows up over and over again in the book of Ephesians. As does the word unity. In the very next chapter, we'll get to this next week, Paul is calling the church to walk together in unity. Look at chapter four, verse three. He's saying, I want you to strive for keeping the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. Like that's where he's going. I want you believers to walk arm in arm in unity in spite of your differences. So this prayer is an important bridge between the theology of the first half of the book of Ephesians and then the practical shoe-leather Christianity of the second half. And prayer is what is going to link the two together. So very practical. Divine love is the glue that holds the church together. That's what this is all about. I'm seeing some people kind of fanning themselves. Is it getting kind of warm in here? All righty. Go ahead and just flip these over to air conditioning. Set them at about 70 degrees. We don't want to turn it into a refrigerator in here. It's tough. We come in, and it's cold, and then we all get in here, and it warms up, and it's getting warm outside. By the way, it looks like it's going to be a beautiful day today, so get outside and enjoy it. It's going to be great. Let's go ahead and dive into this text. How then should we pray? How then should we enjoy Christ's unity-keeping love in our church? We get a wonderful paradigm or outline for our prayer from this passage. Say, I wanna learn how to pray better in a richer way where I will see God's power in my life in the church. Do you not want to see God's love in this church or God's power in this church? Do you not want to experience God's love in your life? I think we do. We need to pray like Paul prays in this. So let's just get some truths here about how we ought to pray. Number one, we need to pray from submission to God, from submission to God. Like this is the posture, the starting point of our praying is here's God and here's us. Notice how Paul expresses this in verse 14. For this cause, I bow my knees under the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole earth and heaven, a whole family in heaven and earth is named. Paul's not just coming up with his own ideas here. He is praying in submission to God. That little phrase, for this cause, reaches back to verse one. In verse one, Paul began to pray for the church. He's like, man, God's making this unity. Let me jump into this prayer. He said, for this cause, I, Paul, the prisoner of our Lord Jesus Christ for you Gentiles, And then he interrupted himself for like 12 verses. You ever do that where you start to say something? You're like, oh, by the way, that reminds me of this thing over here. Paul then goes off to talk about the ministry that he has to take the gospel to the Gentiles. And so now he resumes for this cause. For this cause reaches back to what he said in chapters one and two. In other words, Paul's submission is submission to the purposes of God. Paul's prayer is being guided by what God has revealed to him in the word. That's a really important point for us. You say, I want to learn how to pray. Jesus will talk about if you pray according to my will, God will hear it and answer it. What does it mean to pray according to the will of God? One of the things praying according to the will of God means is our prayers are shaped by and guided by the priorities that the word of God reveals to us. It's not just what do I want, let me pray for that and hope that I'm praying according to the will of God. Ransack the Bible to say what is it that God wants to accomplish in my life and then pray for that. We find out in chapter one that God has chosen us in Christ that we would be holy and without blame before him. You know what's something we should pray for? God, would you help me to be holy and without blame before you? We find out that in love he has made us one in Christ. So praying that we would love one another and enjoy unity as believers, that's a good thing to pray for. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church. You know a great thing to pray? God, would you help me to love my wife? Would you show me how to do that? Fathers, bring your children up in the nurture and admonition of Christ. Pray for that. The things that God commands you to do, pray for Him to give you the ability to do. And the things that God promises to you, pray for God to bring those promises to life in your life. That is what Paul is saying for this cause. Then he says, My knees. Now, Jewish people in Paul's day typically would pray standing in God's presence with arms stretched upward. By the way, it is perfectly acceptable to raise your hand when you were praying, when you were worshiping. That is something that they did in the Bible. But bowing the knee would be something that you would do in the presence of a king. You come to go visit the king, you're not just be like, hey dude, what's up? But you are bowing before him to show respect for his position. Bowing the knee before God is showing God you're here and I'm here. You're the king and I'm the subject. You're the creator, I'm the creature. There's a distinction here. Yet the king, this is so beautiful, the king is also our father. He's not just this distinct king, like I've got to go to him and respect and use special language. We're talking to dad, and dad happens to be the king of kings and lord of lords. Our father, the one to whom we cry Abba, just happens to be the creator of the universe. So as Paul is praying from submission, he is praying in submission to the purposes of God revealed in the word, and in submission to the person of God, the one who's the king, the one who is father. In our world today, the idea of father and showing respect to father and mother has kind of fallen on hard times, but in the ancient world, the father ruled the household. It was a position of great respect. By praying to God as father, Paul is not being flippant or disrespectful. He is coming in reverence and humility before God. Jesus himself told us how to pray. He says, when you pray, pray like this. Our father, which art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. It starts off with God, you're here, and I submit myself to you. Think about how richer your prayers would be if you prayed from a place of submission. If the first part of your prayer was given over to worship and to reverence in God's presence. What if our prayers went from, here's my wish list, God, like big Santa Claus in the sky, here we go, let me hit send, and off they go. but coming to God as father, coming to God as the one who has revealed his purposes to us in the scripture. What if we linked together our time in the word? Hopefully you're spending time every day reading the Bible, but do you ever feel like there's a wall of separation between, I got my Bible reading and I read the Bible as somewhere in Leviticus right now, and then over here's my praying. What if we knocked over the wall with a sledgehammer of meditation? I know that's like a really bad metaphor, meditation, sledgehammer, but meditation, thinking on God's word and thinking about how it informs our praying can unite together our Bible reading and our praying so they're not sort of two separate academic activities, but making them one act of worship, submission to God. We now come into the body of the prayer. So verses 14 and 15, Paul is laying out this There's attitude of submission. By the way, that phrase in verse 15, of whom the whole family, the idea is every family, every family in heaven and earth is named. Some people take that to mean saints that are in heaven, saints that are on earth, like the family of God. I'm so glad I'm part of the family of God. Or some take that to mean the angels who are in heaven and humans who are on earth. And what this is saying is the whole idea of fatherhood, the word for family is patria, and the word for father is pater. There's a play on words here. Fatherhood itself is modeled on God's fatherhood. So even when we have imperfect dads, the fact that we can have this idea of imperfect dads or flawed dads or failed dads implies that there is a real idea of dadness, of fatherhood, and it is God. So even when you have an imperfect dad, know there is a perfect father in heaven. And the idea of naming is about authority. He's the creator of angels, of humans. He has complete and total authority. We come now into the actual requests. Verse 16 and 17, we get the first petition here. Paul is praying for strength, that we would enjoy Christ's presence. So look at verse 16. We're praying to God the Father that, here's the content, that he would grant you, that he would give you. according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." And the way this is structured is those two things are sort of like two sides of one coin. So I'm praying that God would strengthen you internally so that Christ would be able to dwell in you in your heart. You can kind of see the parallelism between inner man in verse 16 and in your heart, verse 17. You kind of see those are the same ideas, like the real you on the inside. Heart is not just sort of a metaphor for like emotion, but it's the control center of your life. The real you, what you think and believe and value. So I want Christ to dwell there. I want God's Holy Spirit to empower you internally. So this request, this request that we should have for ourselves and for our church, pray for God to strengthen you so you would be able to enjoy Christ's presence. That's a stunning thing to pray. Pray that the Father would give you this strength, that he would strengthen you with might, that he would give you spiritual ability. And notice the means of that is by His Spirit. This is very Trinitarian. We're praying to the Father for empowering by the Spirit so that Christ would dwell in our hearts. If you are not a Trinitarian, you're not a Christian, right? Christianity has this foundational belief that there is one God who exists eternally in three persons as God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And here it is, Paul is praying this rich Trinitarian prayer that the Father would give strength mediated by the Spirit so that the Son, Christ, would indwell our hearts. Saying we need strength. You know what that implies? We are weak. In fact, without Christ, we are completely without strength. Ryan read at the outset Romans 5, in due time, when we were without strength. I think sometimes we think that in our condition without Jesus, well, we can do some things. I can sort of respond to God and do these things, and according to Romans 5, we are utterly powerless. We have been completely rendered powerless by sin. If you're here today, you have not been born again. The Bible says that your condition is you do not have any spiritual strength, that in your flesh there's nothing you can do to please God. You can't do any good works. You can't do things that God's gonna sort of be impressed by. The only thing we're good at as sinners is sinning. We don't have the ability to save ourselves. But when we get saved, God, brings us to life, he raises us from spiritual death, we saw that in Ephesians 2, and he gives us the strength whereby we're able to please God. And Paul is praying for people who are already Christians for God to continue to give this spiritual strength by his spirit. God's power comes to us through his Holy Spirit. Now, in the book of Ephesians, there is a rich theology of what the Holy Spirit does. In chapter one, he's the one, the moment we are saved, he seals us, giving proof that we belong to God. The Holy Spirit in your life is proof you belong to God. He's the one who enlightens our eyes in Ephesians 1. He's the one who ushers us in chapter 2, verse 18, for through him we have access by one Spirit unto the Father. He brings us into the throne room of the Father. He's the one who makes us the dwelling place of God, Ephesians 2.22, in whom ye also are builded together for inhabitation of God through the Spirit. The Holy Spirit of God is not a footnote in the Christian life. He's the power for the Christian life. So Paul's saying, I'm praying you'd be strengthened with might in the inner man. Paul uses this idea in 2 Corinthians 4. He's talking about the suffering he's going through. He says, though the outward man perish, the inward man is renewed day by day. Those of you who are maybe a little bit older than me, you're like, I can testify to that. The outward man, the physical body, just kind of wears down, and it slows down, and the eyesight's not as great as it used to be, and I gotta get glasses, and the hearing is not as great, and I gotta get hearing aids, and I gotta go to the doctor, and get arteries opened up, and gotta start taking medication. We understand what it is to age, and to feel weary, and exhausted, and to feel like this physical body is wearing down. This physical body, according to The book of Psalms, God gives us 70 years of reason by strength. He gives us 80. It doesn't last that long. You think about how long history is. Okay, 70, 80, 90 years is a blip on the radar screen. Yet how often do we exert all of our energy and the majority of our praying, praying for merely physical things that won't matter 100 years from now? I am all for praying for those who are sick. I'm all for praying for God's physical provision. In fact, we are to pray, give us this day our daily bread. But I wonder if we are not guilty of neglecting the inner man because we're so focused on the outer man. We spend hours and thousands of dollars to keep this physical body in shape and keep it healthy, but do precious little to strengthen the inner man. precious little time in prayer and in the Word of God to be strengthened. I'm not suggesting that you neglect the physical body and go become a monk and, you know, no, that's not what I'm suggesting. But I am suggesting that of the two, the inner man, the spiritual life, our walk with Jesus, needs to get priority. So notice the point of all this, verse 17. Paul's praying for the strength. You see, we can pray for strength and power for really selfish ends. I want power so I can sort of manipulate and control people. I want spiritual power so I can be charismatic and get people to really like me and so I can win friends and influence people. Paul's not doing that. He's saying, I'm praying for the strength so Christ would dwell in your hearts by faith. You say, hang on a second. I thought that Christ already dwelled in my heart. Like when I got saved, like if any man is in Christ, like I have his indwelling presence. Okay, that's certainly true. Paul's praying for power so Christ would really be able to dwell in our hearts by faith. Here's the idea. This word that's rendered dwell is not just that he would, it's not so much the idea that he would sort of move in for the first time, but the idea here is that he would settle down. You know, there's a difference between taking ownership of a house and making that house your home. There's a difference between having a house and having a home. And it's more than just having your name on the title. It's about moving in, and this becomes my place. And I painted that wall, and I made that renovation over there. What Paul is praying is not that, well, you're a Christian, but you don't have Christ dwelling in your heart, but he's saying, I'm praying that Christ would settle down and really take ownership in your life, at the control center of your life, in your heart by faith. So if you're a Christian, Christ indwells you from the moment of conversion. If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he's none of his. We want to see him permanently settle down. Back in Ephesians 2.22, Paul had stated that we as Christians are being built together for a habitation of God. That's the noun form for the word over here, to dwell, to settle down. In other words, Christ being in our lives, he is not just renting or staying the night as a guest. When you become a Christian, he takes up ownership and residence in your life. He's ripping up the ugly linoleum, he's repainting those hideous orange walls, he's getting rid of the weeds in the backyard, he's rearranging the furniture, he's changing out the cabinets, and he's hauling out bags of rotting trash from the basement. In other words, when you become a Christian, he takes ownership, and our lives no longer belong to us, and he begins a renovation project that continues on until we enter into glory. In short, when you become a Christian, you're not the owner anymore. There's a theology out there that kind of says that Christ, you invite Jesus into your heart, and then it's sort of up to you whether or not He takes ownership. Like that's biblically baloney. When Christ saves you, He takes control. He is Lord and Savior and King and Owner and Occupant. Sometimes you get the language of invite Jesus into your heart. I get where that comes from. John 1 says, as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God. But I think we can sometimes get the wrong idea. We don't invite Jesus into our hearts like you might invite the pastor over for dinner on a Thursday night. I come, I eat, I leave. I don't come in and start being like, man, let me knock that wall. That would be totally inappropriate for a guest. I think as long as we think we invite Jesus into our hearts like we invite a guest over for dinner, but we still own it. If by invite Jesus into your heart, you mean this. We invite Jesus into our hearts like an indebted homeowner invites the mortgage company to foreclose and repossess the house. It's his, and he owns it, and he gets to do with it what he wants. We're praying that Christ would dwell in our hearts by faith, and he is gonna take ownership. So what kind of renovation projects does he begin in our hearts? Well, the rest of Ephesians talks about them. Let me just give you an example. Look in Ephesians 4, verse 25. Paul's contrasting the old life when you owned the house with the new life with Jesus taking up residence. Ephesians 4, 25, wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor. So he's gonna change the way that we speak. Verse 28, let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may give to him that needeth. So he takes over the things that we have, where we become generous rather than greedy. Verse 31, let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, has forgiven you. He renovates our relationships. We come into chapter five, he takes over our lives in the most intimate kind of way, where Paul says, listen, fornication, sexual immorality, that has no place in the life of a Christian because Jesus now owns you. Husbands love your wives. I mean, literally every room of the house, from your marriage relationship, to your job, to your parenting, to your speech, to your thought life, Jesus takes over and he begins a renovation project. So when we pray for Christ to dwell in our hearts by faith, that is what you're asking God to do. You're saying, Jesus, if I'm a Christian, you already dwell, but would you really settle down and take over? What renovation projects is he currently working on in your life? By the way, that means that all of us are always between the already and the not yet. None of us have arrived. You ever do a renovation project that never quite finishes? It seems to be the way when you live in the house, you're like, I know that we need those new baseboards, but whatever. You're sort of ongoing projects. That is what the Christian life is like, one ongoing project after another, and we're there in the middle of the dust and the chaos and the reorganization. Let's love people who are in a different stage of that renovation project. People who are working in different areas that maybe Jesus has already finished that in our lives. So as we pray, we want to pray from a place of submission to God. What's his purpose that we would be the dwelling place of God? We want to pray for strength, strengthen in the inner man. We need God's power to bring this change about. It is not through human power, through human ability, through human methodology. It is the power of the Holy Spirit through the word of God by means of prayer that Christ takes over. But let's move on to this next request Paul has. At the end of verse 17, we get that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge. So the first request is that you would have power for Christ and dwell your heart. Second request is that you would be able to grasp Christ's limitless love. Now there's obviously a paradox in this, but notice how love punctuates the text. Verse 18 says you are, or verse 17 rather, you are rooted and grounded in love. Tense of this is to say this has already happened. Because you have been rooted and grounded in love, I'm praying that you would be able to grasp all the dimensions of this love and that you would know love that passes knowledge. So love sort of brackets this request. pray for perception to grasp Christ's limitless love. These requests Paul is offering are like steps up a staircase. They kind of build on one. So we start with, we want Christ to move in and take over our lives. And as he's taking over our lives, that we would grasp more and more of his love. And as we grasp more and more of his love, we're brought to a place where we are filled with all the fullness of God, where we become all that God wants us to be. So notice how Paul breaks down this love We're rooted and grounded in love. This has already happened. This is foundational. For us to know Christ's love, we have to first experience something of his love. We have to be brought into a love relationship with him. This assumes that we have already been planted in it. Back in chapter one, look back in chapter one, verse four, according as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and without blame before him in love. This begins with God's work in eternity past. This being rooted and grounded starts with God's work in eternity past. Look in chapter two, verse four. It's like we're dead, and then he says, but God who is rich in mercy because of his great love wherewith he loved us has made us alive together with Christ. So it's God's love that chose us before the foundation of the world. It's God's love that makes us alive in that moment of conversion. And here Paul is saying it is God's love that we are rooted and grounded in. Now, we've got a couple of metaphors going on. Being rooted, okay, so how many of you like to do gardening or plant trees or that kind of thing? If you want me to kill anything and bite me over, I can totally do that by trying to grow something. But the idea here is the roots go down into the soil to get the life-giving nutrients. Then this word grounded is the idea of laying a foundation. How many of you like building stuff? Cool, a couple of hands like to build stuff. Terrible at building stuff as well. I have no practical skills to offer. But the idea here is a building's gotta be built on a foundation. Plants gotta have their roots down in the soil. And what Paul is saying is that the soil into which the spiritual roots go is God's love. The foundation on which the building is built is God's love. Christian growth is like a plant that grows. It's like a building that is built. Both take time and effort. So one writer said this, love is the soil in which believers are rooted and will grow, the foundation on which they are built. He says, is this our love for each other or God's love for us? I think in the context, we're talking about God's love for us. That is foundational, that God has loved sinners like you and me. You say, why did God love sinners like you and me? Why does God save us? God saves us because He loves us, and He loves us because He loves us. There's not any reason behind it where God's like, well, I've got an ulterior motive here, or there's something really good in these sinners. He loves us because He loves us, and that's the foundation for everything else. So Paul's saying, because you're already rooted and grounded in His love. Now, I don't want to assume that everyone here today is already rooted and grounded in His love. Our natural condition without Jesus is to be outside of his love, to be the objects of his wrath, to be lawbreakers, to be those who do our own thing. Rather than speaking truth, we lie. Rather than giving, we steal and we're selfish. Rather than loving others and prioritizing their well-being, we treat others as objects to give us what we want. We have hearts that are rotten and that are set against God, and God being a holy God hates sin. God being a holy God must judge sin. He wouldn't be God if he's just gonna give sin a free pass. But through faith in Jesus, we can enter into his love. It's because God set his love on us, he sends Jesus to die for us, that anyone who believes, anyone who repents of their sin, becomes a child of God, becomes the eternal object of his love. And nothing, as Nate read, will separate us from the love of Christ. So don't just assume that, oh, God just sort of loves everybody and we're all good to go. No. or have to be brought into that. You have to be planted and the building has to be, the foundation must be laid. And that happens when you come to that place of seeing that I'm lost and I'm a sinner and I don't deserve God's love. In fact, I deserve His wrath and I bow before Him in repentance and faith. If you have never done that, I would urge you, I would beg you today, come to Christ to taste of His love. Come to Christ to get that forgiveness. Come to Christ to have your sins forgiven and to be justified in His sight. But the point of Paul's prayer, assuming that's already happened if you're a Christian, here it is in verse 18, he's praying that you may be able to comprehend with all saints. Okay, may be able, that is the word power. You might have the ability or the power to do something which suggests that in our human ability, we cannot get our arms around God's love. We cannot understand it. You'd be able to comprehend, understand, take hold of with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and depth and height. Okay, we're getting sort of the measurements of a building, if you will. and to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge. Paul is saying, I want you to know not just this foundational love, but this measureless love. We get a metaphor here. It's multidimensional. We can't just think of God's love as sort of John 3, 16, that's the only verse about God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. God's love has got this depth and breadth and length and height to it. That's what verse 18 is describing. We could think of those in a number of different ways, that his love is deep enough to reach the most wicked sinner. It's high enough to take us to heaven. It's broad enough to take in all the nations of the earth. And it is long enough to last for all eternity. We can think of God's love on a timeline. We can think about how the fact that if you are his child, he loves you passionately right now. Think of that. You are the object of infinite divine love. That's stunning. But to realize that that love God set upon you in eternity past, before there was a heaven or an earth, before the sun began to shine, before the time began its inevitable march to eternity future, God loved you. And to think that 10 million years from now, you will still be basking in the light of God's love for you. I mean, there are so many different ways to measure and to think about and to consider and meditate on God's love. We sang that hymn, Could We With Ink the Oceans Fill. We talked about the fact that even if the sky were of parchment made and every person on earth a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the oceans dry, nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky. Love that is measureless. Love that is so immense we cannot put a tape measure on it, we cannot put a stopwatch on it, without beginning, without end. A. W. Tozer wrote this in the Knowledge of the Holy, wonderful book. Because God is self-existent, his love had no beginning, no end. Because he is eternal, his love can have no end. Because he is infinite, it has no limit. Because he is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity. Because he is immense, his love is incomprehensibly vast and bottomless as a shoreless sea. That's God's love. And Paul's saying, Christians, I'm praying that you would be able to understand that. Which brings us into the realm of paradox. Look at verse 19. I want you to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge. Okay, Paul, you're losing me. Love that is beyond knowledge. To know the beyond knowledge love of Christ is how that's put together. We're getting beyond just intellectual ability to go read a systematic theology and be like, I understand the love of Christ. Or I looked it up in a dictionary. We're talking about experience. We're talking about the love of Christ being shed abroad in your hearts by the Holy Spirit, which is given to us. We're talking about those times when your world is falling apart, and you feel like there's not a person in the world who loves you, and you feel like, I have no idea what tomorrow's gonna hold. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my Father in heaven loves me immensely, even though every circumstance suggests that he doesn't. Even though I'm facing life and death, even though I feel like all the demons of hell are attacking me, I know that nothing will separate me from the love of Christ. And I don't know that I can put that into words. It goes beyond our ability to express that. But it is something that every saint who has experienced it knows exactly what I'm talking about. We go beyond metaphor into mystery here. Can you identify with the apostle's passion? In Philippians 3, when he says, yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss, for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I count all things but loss, that I may win Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but the righteousness which is by faith of the Son of God, that I may know him. You see, no matter how much you know of God's love, it's not even the beginning. It's like going down to Dauphin Island, and taking a little cup out of the Gulf of Mexico, being like, oh yeah, I know all about the Gulf of Mexico. Pick up a little handful of sand, being like, oh, I've got sand figured out. Know it's infinite, that we will spend all of eternity singing and celebrating and learning more of Christ's love for us. So Paul is praying for the impossible. I'm praying that you would know that which cannot actually be known. So we cannot fully plumb the depth of Christ's love, but we can know something of it. We can know God, but we cannot know God perfectly and infinitely. So sometimes people will say, God is incomprehensible, you cannot know him. We cannot know him fully, but we can know him truly. We cannot know everything there is to know of God's love, but we really can know God's love. So how do we deepen our knowledge of God's love? That's a great question, right? If Paul's saying, I'm praying that you would know something here. Well, I would suggest to you from the context, we get some clues to say, here's how this prayer is gonna be answered. We come to know his love through worship. What is Paul in the middle of doing? Praying. On his knees before the father of whom all the families of heaven and earth are named. What's he praying according to? What God has revealed. The word of God and prayer are the chief places where we come to know more of his love. People who know more of God's love are people who are people of the book. People who get into the word of God and saturate themselves in that. We grasp God's Immense, measureless, yet knowable love through worship. It is through the Bible that we hear God's voice. It is through the Bible that we see his acts displayed in history. It is through the Bible that we glimpse his face and sense his heart. But there was a phrase I jumped over in verse 19, I mean verse 18, that we may be able to comprehend with all saints. This is not an individualistic pursuit that I'm gonna go off into the woods and get a cabin with a Bible and I'm gonna come to figure out God's love. We come to understand and know God's love through worship, but we come to understand it through fellowship with other saints. God's love is so vast and so immense, it is a community project for us to come to learn it. You will not come to know God in isolation. I hear people say this sometimes, well, you know what, I'm just gonna go fishing this Sunday because just me and Jesus with a Bible out in that boat, that's good enough for me. Yet the Bible affirms over and over again that fellowship with other believers, with all the saints, is key for us knowing what God wants us to know. And when he says with all the saints, I think he means more than just the saints who are here at Cloverleaf Baptist Church. I think he means this is us interacting with saints who are in other churches and in other places in the world. And this is not just interacting with saints who are living, but saints who are dead. You know how we interact with saints who are dead? We read the stuff that they wrote down. Guys like Samuel Rutherford, who had a burning passion for Jesus Christ, wrote these incredible letters. Or David Brainerd who kept a journal and recorded his relationship with Jesus Christ. Or going back and reading Augustine's Confessions and seeing, look at this white hot passion he has for God and his love. Do this with all saints. Fellowship with saints living and dead, saints present and absent. Saints who are Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, past and present, white and black. God's love is so vast. We put it this way, why does God save a people out of every nation and tribe and tongue and have them glorifying in his presence? Because God's love is like this multifaceted diamond that no single culture can fully worship. The diversity of the cultures of the world that God is saving for his name reflects something unique of his immense multifaceted infinite love. So we're praying that we would be able to grasp Christ's limitless love. Now the end of verse 19 gives us kind of a summary of the whole thing. We've got two big requests, enjoy Christ's presence, grasp his love. Paul's like, let me put it this way. Look at the end of verse 19, that ye may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now think of these steps going up. This is taking us to the top floor. Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. We grasp something of the limitless love of Jesus Christ, and it brings us to a place where we become all that God wants us to be, filled with the fullness of God. Now, at this point, my mind is somewhat blown. Being filled with the fullness of God is like saying, my little coffee mug, I'm gonna fill it with all the waters of the Pacific Ocean. My cup's not big enough for that kind of thing. Our souls, our hearts are not big enough to be filled with all the fullness of God. The idea here is that we are brought to fullness, we are brought to maturity. You know who the fullness of God is according to the book of Colossians? Christ is the fullness of God. So to be filled with the fullness of God is another way to say this, that we look more and more like Jesus. We're brought to a place of maturity. So we pray for spiritual maturity. Now how does God bring this about? What's the prior to requests? Christ renovating and transforming our lives. His love, us grasping more and more of this. We have this idea today of love that, well, if you love someone unconditionally, you don't ever want them to change. And if you love your kids, you just want them to just sort of be who they are. I think that's wrong. It would be wrong for me to say the way for me to love Timothy is to let him continue babbling on and never learn anything. A parent's love for their child is not expressing them saying, hey, do whatever you want, kid. Go ahead and stick your finger in the light sockets, that's fine. If that's what you wanna do, go do it. Genuine love wants to see the object of love become the best it can be. Let me define love. We've been talking about love all day, but let me give you a definition of love. Love is seeking the ultimate good of the one you love, even at great expense to yourself. That's what love is. Love is seeking the ultimate good of the one you love, even at great expense to yourself. And that is precisely what God's love does for us. It's seeking our ultimate good. You know what our ultimate good is? It is to be like Christ. For us to look like Jesus, for us to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And God loves us way too much to leave us in our sin, to allow us to settle for second best. And you know why God brings suffering into our lives? Is to break our grip on things that are not for our ultimate good. When we begin to love the gifts more than the giver, when we say, I love my kids so much, I could never live without them, God's like, no, I'm gonna make them grow up and leave home, because those are not ultimate things. I want you to love me ultimately. God loves us too much to let us settle for second best. And so he brings suffering, he brings chastening, he brings hardship into our lives, not because he hates us, but because he loves us. The opposite of love, the ultimate expression of hatred, is just not caring. I don't care what you do. God, as C.S. Lewis said, has played us the intolerable compliment of loving us. To where people who are not in God's family, you're like, man, look at these people in the world, like they have it easy, Psalm 73. But here I am as God's child, I'm going through suffering and I'm being forced to grow and I have to repent of sin and it's hard because God loves you. He scourges, He chastens every son whom He receives. So when we pray, God, I want to be filled with your fullness, that means He's going to have to get other stuff out of that coffee mug. It means He's going to have to empty our lives of things that are not for our good. He's going to get the poison and the dirt and the mud and the filth out so we can be filled with what is ultimately good, which is Him. So in the final estimation, to be filled with the fullness of God brings God immense glory because He is seen to be what He really is, the God who is the ultimate and only good in all the universe. and we are brought to a place of complete satisfaction and maturity because we are filled with Him. God cannot give us an ultimate good other than Himself because it doesn't exist. It doesn't. And He loves us too much to let us settle for anything less. So don't reduce love to indifferent tolerance. That is not love. Genuine love is seeking the ultimate good of the one who is loved, and God does that by bringing us to a place of maturity. We come now to verses 20 and 21, and we find this, that we are to pray for God's glory. Pray, like that's our aim, that's our goal. What Paul has asked for, I think as we break this down, we get a sense of just how awesome this is, to be filled with the fullness of God. You're like a little coffee cup, big ocean. Asking for something that is humanly impossible. Praying that you would be able to grasp love that cannot be grasped. For Christ who is perfect to move into our lives and take over. Basically, Paul is praying for things that are absurdly enormous. And so verse 20 tells us that, yeah, unless the God that we're talking to is infinite. Now unto him that is able. This doxology, this word of praise is not just, hey, we wanna just say something nice to God. This ties directly into what he has been praying. He's been praying that we would be strengthened with might in verse 16. He's praying that we would have the ability. There's that word, the same word, the dunamau, that we see here in verse 20. We're praying for strength, we're praying for power, we're praying for ability, and he's saying God is the able one. The one who is omnipotent, the one who is limitless in his power. Now notice how he piles up these modifiers. Could it be enough to say God's able to do this? To do exceeding, abundantly, above all that we ask or think. You say like, hey, let me just take my prayer request to the absolute limits of what I could imagine. Let me ask for God to do the biggest, most impossible thing that I can even begin to fathom with my puny little finite brain. And Paul's saying, Yeah, God's able to do way more than even that. Wow. Immense power. He is omnipotent. His omnipotence is limitless, meaning that nothing that we are asking for here is beyond his ability to grant. When God gives us gifts, it does not make him any poorer. When God writes a check, it doesn't deplete his bank account. When God sheds love upon us, it doesn't mean that there is, well, he's depleted now. He answers his prayer according to verse 16, according to the riches of his glory. And because God is limitless, his gifts are limitless. Now, some people are thinking here, cool, let me get God to get me a Lamborghini. Again, the things that Paul are praying for are so much bigger than Lamborghinis or big houses. It's for God to actually break our affection and the hold of those things on our heart that we would grasp after that, which is truly good, which is him. God's answers outstrip our requests. His fulfillments go beyond His promises and His blessings cascade out into all eternity. He is able to do exceeding, abundantly beyond all that we could ask or think according to the power that is working in us. This power has already been unleashed in our hearts. So we get now to the doxology itself in verse 21. Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages. It's like this God who answers prayers in this way is to be the object of our praise to receive all glory. Now this is interesting because verse 16 tells us that the source of these requests is what? The riches of his glory. So glory is something that God possesses. It's his splendor, it's his wealth, it's all that he is. And then the prayer request is for God to receive glory. This doesn't mean that we're adding to God and we're like, oh, we're going to make God more glorious by saying nice things to him. Rather, we're simply acknowledging what is. God showers his glory on us, and then we, like a mirror, reflect it back to him in worship. We're simply acknowledging what is his due. Unto him be glory. Notice this, in the church, in the assembly, in the congregation of God's people, Cloverleaf Baptist Church exists for the glory of God. We exist to be a stage for God to demonstrate his power upon. We exist to be a megaphone through which God speaks and so the nations hear his voice. We exist not for our own comfort and for our own preferences to be met or for our own whims to be catered to. We exist to bring glory to God and to worship him in the way that he has told us he wants to be worshiped. Unto him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of all that God is. He's the one who saves us, who enables us to bring him glory. And then we get this final clause, throughout all ages, world without end. is a number of different ways Paul could say forever. Normally he would say, into the ages of the ages. But here he takes, pulls out all the stops in the language. Literally, the God would be glorified to all the generations of the age of the ages. So think about waves of eternity crashing onto the shore of heaven. He's saying, forever and ever and ever and ever, he's going to receive glory. It starts right now, we sing and we praise him, and it's never gonna end. That's what we'll be doing for all eternity is delighting in and rejoicing in and enjoying the God who has saved us and showered us with his love. Now imagine with me a church that prays like this. What if every member of Cloverleaf Baptist Church says, I wanna pray from a place of just complete submission to God? kingdom come, thy will be done. What does your word say I should pray for? What if we prayed for Christ to indwell our hearts and take over our lives? What if we prayed, God, would you help me to understand your love more and more? What if we were all praying, God, would you by your love move me to greater maturity? God, would you make this all about you, about your glory? I guarantee you if we had a church full of people who prayed like that, Revival would break out. Unity would be so strong nothing could pull it apart. And the more we become aware of the fact how immensely God loves us, it becomes really hard to not love other people. God loves me. I know I'm a sinner. He loves me. And this guy over here across the church who kind of annoys me, God also loves him. So if God loves me and God loves the other people in the church who might irritate me or might be naturally divided from, That then motivates and fuels my love for them. And so it starts this amazing cycle of God loves me. And so because of that, I love God. And because I love God and I know God loves other people, I love them as well. We love because he first loved us. Would you bow with me as we pray? In fact, I would just invite you, this is unusual.