Discovering What Seems...
| The Unknowable Love of Christ |
| Fullness...The Impossible Realm of God's Grace |
the Love of God will gain strength in us
as we proceed with this month’s discipline.
Ephesians 3:17-19 We pray...That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; 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 passeth knowledge...
…that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.
Heavenly Father,
Reveal Yourself to these I hold before You. Let them bathe in Your healing presence. Draw them into Your fullness by revealing to them how Christ wants to dwell in them. Draw them toward knowing their specific place in Christ's body so they can fulfill their part in the expression of Your fullness in the earth. Help them remember that dwelling in unbroken communion with You is possible and it will lead them to a personal fullness. Increase the desire within them to know more and more of Your fullness,In the Name of Christ Jesus, our Lord…
John 1:15-17 John bare witness of Him, and cried, saying, This was He of Whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for He was before me. And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
The above term grace for grace is beautiful and unusual. Seeing it in the Original opens a depth in the passage that we do not readily see in its translation. The Greek New Testament reads thus: charis anti charitos. The words charis and charitos are forms of the same word that means the deep and awesome grace of God. It accepts us as we are. In it we find the expression of God’s unconditional love that is extended to us in Christ Jesus Who died for us. Now He lives for us—to live in us.
The word anti places the two words for “grace” in a beautiful collaboration one with the other. It’s “grace anti grace.” While anti basically means “against,” we need a better understanding of it. We find this in an illustration seen in the waves of the ocean. I watched one day as I stood on a beach allowing the waves to wash over my feet. They came from an unknown depth. As one wave would retreat to become lost again in the depth of the ocean, another was already on its way to meet me. It was wave “against” wave, just as we’re coming to know grace “against” grace. Before one wave of grace is gone, another is already on its way.
If we think some of the things we've been learning about praying are awesome, the prayer for this month is more so. We are about to ask for something the universe itself cannot contain. It's more than all the minds in the world can imagine. Yet Paul is teaching us to expect it in our hearts. It is our prayer that we--and the ones we hold before the Lord--might be filled with all the fullness of God. This prayer is the outgrowth and development of the praying we've been doing for the past two months. It will take some time to consider this continuation, however. It is not a light thing we're learning to ask.