Journey Into Love
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—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
(Ephesians 3:17-19)
Throughout history, songs have been written about love. The Beatles sang “All You Need is Love.” The rock band Foreigner topped the charts with “I Want to Know What Love Is.” A more recent hit by Taylor Swift is “Love Story.” Love songs have been the bread and butter of the music industry for decades because they echo our deepest desire: to love and be loved.
Throughout my travels around the world, time and time again, I realize that love is not something that you can teach. No matter how much we sing, describe, or even preach about love, the reality is, it can never be defined in informational terms. To truly understand and know love, it has to be encountered.
In my own journey of discovering love, it has taken me nearly four decades to begin to understand the nature of this most powerful universal force. The word love itself is vague and often misrepresented. The New Testament writers had four different words for love, each describing a different facet of its nature. Love was described in terms of family love, friendship love, desire – or sexual – love, and most importantly unconditional love (agape). In their purest form, these different faces of love have the power to shift atmospheres and restore broken hearts. Love was designed to be transformational.
Do you remember your first love or even your current one? How their love could lift your spirit, dominate your soul and energize your body? When I was courting my wife, Barbara, she became my ray of sunshine, the hope of my day, and the sweet dreams of my night. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to be with her. This year we celebrate 25 years together and looking back, that first love we shared seems so shallow compared to the depth of love we now know. Having overcome the battles of life together, our love has deepened with each season and our lives have been beautifully transformed. That is the wonder of the power of love.
It is hard to define love because it involves a personal journey of growth that has no bounds. God is love, and His infinite nature means that the width, length, height, and depth of love are boundless. This love will take us on an amazing, eternal discovery beyond even our time on this earth. However, the true nature of love needs to be seeded, nurtured, and rooted in our hearts, in order for the fullness of God to be manifested in us. In this series of blogs, let us establish the roots of love as we journey together into the boundless depths of God.
