5.9.23 | Ephesians 3:14-21

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Tuesday Prayer

45 minutes of worship, contemplation, and intercession

Prayer Guide

“To know this love that surpasses knowledge”

Ephesians 3:19

Netflix just put out a documentary called INFINITY. Watch it if you are ever interested in realizing how puny and limited the human mind is. As intelligent and crafty as humans are…we eventually hit the limits of our intellect when we come face to face with the infinite. 

God is infinite. As is his love. In the same way that our minds turn to mush when we try to grasp infinity, they fail us when we try to comprehend his love. In this scripture, Paul describes the love of God as “transcending knowledge.” The greek for transcend is hyperballo which literally means to “overthrow or exceedingly surpass.” The love of God supersedes and excels beyond knowledge. God’s love is like a racehorse, we will never intellectually catch up to it, as hard as we try to chase after it or seek to understand it. 

God’s love, like a swimming pool, has a shallow end. We can enter his love as a small child when we trust with our hearts the words of the song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” But unlike a normal swimming pool, the swimming pool of God’s love does not have another side…it just goes on and on and on, getting deeper and deeper and deeper. The wisest sages and scholars remain limited by their human frames; they can’t touch the bottom. Even the Pacific Ocean has boundaries, but God’s love has no end. It is infinitely deep. 

And yet, even if we can’t understand God’s love, we can nonetheless know it. Paul prays that we would “know this love that surpasses knowledge.” The word for know, gnosko, is a relational knowledge. This is the word used in the Greek Old Testament for sexual intimacy (ie. Adam knew his wife Eve and she became pregnant). Even if we can’t understand God’s love, we can and are made to know it, intimately. Even if we can’t fathom the depths, we can swim in the ocean. It is the purpose of our lives and our eternal destiny to know God’s love by experience. 

One of the brutal realities in our world is that so few of us are living in an experiential awareness of the love of God. So few of us are swimming in it. We so often walk around thinking he is distant, or that we are on our own, or that he doesn’t care about us or our problems. And I’m referring to people in the church. Then there are literally billions of people in the world who literally have never even heard about Jesus or the gospel. 

This is why Paul prays for the Spirit of God to reveal God’s love to our hearts. 

Let’s join Paul in praying for those things today:

For Prayer:

  • Pray for believers, especially those in our church, who need an experiential revelation of God’s love. They know about his love, but don’t know his love intimately. 
  • Pray for the billions of people in the world who have no idea God loves them, who haven’t even heard the gospel or heard about Jesus. Pray that God, out of his mercy will send laborers into the mission field and activate believers as witnesses to tell people of his love.