Ephesians 3:19
“To know the love of Christ which passes knowledge;”
The greatest inner need of all humans is love. We are wired to have it and intrinsically we know when we don’t. Maybe it’s not realized that “love lack” is the problem, but behaviors will show it’s longed for and one will do almost anything to get it.
There are many substitutes for real love that only comes from God. Many love substitutes act as suitors, looking to take true love’s place. Without God’s love, however, the heart is in a constant state of restlessness, searching like a lost child for their mother. This frantic heart, untamed by God’s love, will be consumed by its need for satisfaction.
A heart without God’s love can only survive on a quest to find love, because like a body that’s dying of thirst isn’t concerned with anything beyond water, a heart without God’s love can’t live beyond searching for this love.
Many unhealthy and even diabolical behavior is rooted in the lack of God’s love and is therefore cured by God’s love. It’s a deep quest for something the heart knows it must have yet can’t find.
In our text Paul is praying for the church, that they would know this love in an ever increasing and deeper way. What a great prayer, going right to the oxygen of the Christian life. Notice that he wants them to know something that is passed knowledge. How can that be? Perhaps this is why so many can’t find it, yet need it.
This love, God’s love, cannot be reduced to intellectual understanding, it cannot be attained by reason and it cannot be contained by formulas. Without coming to God, Who is the fountain of this love, there can be no calming of our hearts. Resisting God is refusing the deepest need of the human heart, love.
God’s love is beyond human comprehension and can only be given, as a gift of God’s grace, and that can only come by being in a right relationship with Him. When one comes to Christ they come to the fountain of love which tames the heart. It takes humility to receive this gift, but the recipient is the most blessed of all. God’s love is the heart’s medicine.
Is 58:11-14
The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail.
Those from among you shall build the old waste places.
You shall raise up the boundaries of many generations.
And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach,
The Restorer of Streets to Dwell in.
If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My Holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the
Holy Day of the Lord honorable. And honor Him, not doing your own ways, not finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words.
Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord. And I shall cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth. And feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.
The mouth of the Lord has spoken.