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Howdy. Good morning. Please turn to your Bibles to the book of Ephesians chapter 3. We're going to be in chapter 3 again this morning. It's good to be with you all. I want to ask you a question. What kind of prayers do you pray? When you pray, when you're alone with God, what kind of prayers do you pray?

How would you describe them? When you kneel before God in prayer, do you pray bold prayers? Is that how you would define or describe the prayers that you pray? Do you pray things that only God could answer? Only God could possibly answer? Do you pray those kinds of things?

I'm taking a class this semester, and it's on the topic of prayer. It's called Prayer and the Pastor. We're going through some of the material in the Pastor's Institute, and this class has greatly challenged me in my own personal prayer life, specifically in this area, in the things that I pray for, the significance of the things that I pray for.

And it has challenged me to pray more bold prayers. Again, prayers that only God can answer, and prayers like the one we have in Ephesians chapter 3, the prayer like the words of the words. Paul prays for the church here in Ephesus. And so I want to look at that this morning.

If you're just joining us this morning, we're picking up sort of in the middle of Paul's prayer. And I want to read this prayer to you in its fullness and its entirety, just to get our minds reoriented with what Paul is praying, and then we will pick up where we left off last week.

Again, chapter 3 of Ephesians, beginning in verse 14, going all the way through 21. Let me read this for us. Paul prays, For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and the length, and the height, and the depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, and that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

Now, to him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to him be the glory. In the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. Well, as I mentioned last week, this prayer can be easily broken up into three main sections.

I'll put them up here for you just so you can see them, to remind you of them. The first few verses, verses 14 through 15, really is a prelude. It's an introduction to Paul's prayer, some introductory remarks about the right reason to pray and the right posture to pray and who we are to pray to, the Father.

And the middle section of this prayer, the real heart of the prayer, is found in verses 16 to 19. These are his petitions or his requests. These are the things that Paul is asking God for on behalf of this church in Ephesus. And then he concludes his prayer with a prayer of praise, an exclamation of praise to the glory of God.

And this morning we're going to be back in that middle section, the petitions of Paul's prayer, and we're going to be looking at those more deeply this morning. And you, again, remember from last week, there are three petitions that are marked off by the word that. You can see them pretty clearly there in the text.

He prays for three things. Prays first for spiritual strength. You can see that first one. Beginning in verse 16. Spiritual strength. We looked at that last time. The second one is spiritual understanding. That begins in the middle of verse 17. And then the third that is in the beginning, or excuse me, in the middle of verse 19.

And he prays for spiritual maturity. These are the things that Paul is praying for for the lives of these Christians there in Ephesus in the church. These are the three requests, and these were what were on his heart. And they really do serve as an example for us as we pray for ourselves and as we hopefully pray for the people in this church.

These are things that we can pray for as well. So again, last week we looked at this first request for spiritual strength, and we looked at it in somewhat detail, but I can summarize it for you like this. Paul prayed that God would generously give the gift of spiritual strength to your soul, to your inner man.

And he prays that he would give you not only the desire to obey, but the ability to obey him. And that that would be accomplished through his spirit in your inner person, and that it would result in Christ dwelling in your heart. That's What Paul prayed first. He prayed for spiritual strength.

And this morning, we're going to just look at the second request. Again, a prayer for spiritual understanding. And I really want to study this together so that Paul's prayer here for spiritual understanding would be answered in all of you. That God would give each of you this morning and myself growth in our spiritual understanding of God and of God's love for us that He has displayed in Christ.

That's what I want God to do this morning, and I've been praying for this week. So let's begin by looking at this second request. It begins in the middle of verse 17, and it goes through the first half of verse 19. Let me read it again: that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge.

That is his prayer. Now, before we look at the specific content of that request, there's something very important I want you to see, and it's found here in the text, but it is the basis upon which Paul makes this request. The basis of his request. Notice it says, being rooted and grounded in love.

That's the first thing I want you to notice. You see, Paul makes this incredibly bold prayer request on the basis of the spiritual status of those of whom he's praying. The spiritual status. Now, as you may recall, Paul is writing to believers in Ephesus. These are Christians. These are Jews and Gentiles who have been united to God.

They've been united to each other through the person of Christ. They have believed in him. They've trusted in him. They have been placed into the body of Christ. They've been given the mind of Christ. They've been given the Spirit of Christ that has empowered them and strengthens them in the inner man.

It is Christ that is dwelling in their hearts. This is the spiritual status of the ones for whom Paul is making this request. And it's absolutely essential for understanding the things that Paul is going to be praying for. 1 Corinthians 2:14 says, The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised.

Paul is praying for spiritual understanding, and the basis for that understanding is that they must be in Christ. They must be Christians. And that's what Paul is saying. Here, he's praying for Christians, and he's saying their spiritual status as Christians is what causes him or gives him the reason to make this bold request before God.

It's because they've been rooted and grounded in love. That's the basis. What does it mean to be rooted and grounded in love? Well, Paul uses two different metaphors here, two word pictures, to express the same idea. One is from agriculture, and the other one is from the field of architecture.

Again, he uses these to describe something that God has done when he saved them. Something that God has done in salvation. That's what he's talking about here. And we know this because the words that Paul uses here, rooted and grounded, are in the perfect tense, which simply means that this is not a condition into which they are coming into.

He's not praying that they are being rooted and grounded, or that they would be in the future rooted and grounded in love. But rather, he speaks of something that has been completed already. It's a completed action in the past, and it has results that the results of this action are continuing on into the present.

That's the idea. Perhaps a better way to. To state it or translate it is having been rooted in love or having been grounded in love. You see the difference? Again, it speaks of an event that has already taken place in the past, but it continues its result into the present.

That's the idea here that Paul is communicating. And it's also in the passive voice, just like we saw last week. It's something that God does. It's something that has been done to them or for them, not something that they have done themselves. And so this rooting and this grounding is something, again, that God has done on their behalf in the past, and it's communicating something very important about their spiritual lives.

Let's look at these metaphors in a little more detail. First, Paul describes their spiritual status as having been rooted in love. And again, it's taken from agriculture. It literally means to take root, to cause to root, to become firmly planted or firmly rooted. And it gives the idea or an image of a tree, a big tree with deep roots in the ground.

Perhaps if you're thinking of a biblical passage about trees and roots, maybe Psalm 1 comes to your mind, where he describes the blessed man, the man blessed by God. Is like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yield its fruit in its season. Its leaf doesn't wither, and whatever he does prospers.

Psalm 1. And so Paul tells us that these Christians are like a tree that has been rooted in the ground. See if I can give you an illustration here. Yeah. So this is a tree. My wife and daughter had an opportunity to go visit some family in Greenville, South Carolina.

And as they were exploring the town, they came across this tree. And little they know, this apparently is a famous tree. They even have a name, the Medusa tree. It's actually named after a Greek god, but I won't get into that because it's kind of weird. But this is the Medusa tree.

And it's a rather old tree, but the water nearby has eroded away the soil and exposed the root system of the tree. And you can see it there, this massive root system that goes deep into the ground. And so this is kind of the image, really, that Paul is bringing up here when he says rooted, a tree that has been rooted in the ground.

Now, let me ask any kids or youth in the room, what is the purpose of the roots? You can talk out loud. It's okay. I know it's church, but it's okay. What's the purpose of the roots? Why do trees have roots? College students, help them out. Water. Water.

It gets water to the tree. Yeah, nutrients and water. What else? It anchors them. Yeah. Yeah, the roots to a tree are very important. They stabilize the tree. They reach down into the soil and they grab onto the earth and they hold the tree in place. They keep it from blowing over.

And they, as someone mentioned, they get water to the tree. They suck the water out of the ground and the nutrients out of the ground and it draws it up into the rest of the tree, to the outer limits of the tree. And it causes it to flourish and to grow and to produce fruit, depending on the kind of tree it is.

Yeah, so the roots are very important. If a tree is not rooted, it is going to fall over and it is going to die. But a tree that has strong roots, that's planted in good soil, is stable and it is nourished. Well, in the same way, Paul says that the Christian life has been rooted in love.

Love is the soil in which the Christian has been planted so that their spiritual roots can grow deep and wide and provide the stability. To their spiritual life. They have been rooted in love so they might grow and be nourished and fed spiritually. That's the first word picture that Paul gives: to be rooted in love.

Number two, notice the second one. The second metaphor that Paul uses is having been grounded in love. Now, this really stresses the same idea, just with a different picture. Here he brings to our mind the image of a foundation, of a building. Foundation of a building. I know we've got some structural engineers here in the room, and so they understand this: how important a foundation is.

Again, you can translate it like this: it's being grounded on the foundation of love. So, like a tree with its roots, the foundation of a building, again, is extremely important. If you have a poor foundation, or it's a foundation laid on poor soil, what happens? You can go look out there.

You can see what happens on the fellowship, Paul. The soil underneath that kind of erode away, and the whole foundation kind of sunk. And so, we're trying to fix that right now so we can build on top of it. Yeah, when a foundation, we have a poor foundation, and it has poor soil, it breaks, it sinks, it doesn't hold.

Hold up the building. The whole building falls down. Think about the parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. What does Jesus mention there about the house built on the sand? And the wind comes, it falls down because it's built on a faulty foundation. But the house that was built on the rock, upon a solid foundation, it was unmoved because it supported the weight of the building that was on it.

And so, again, Paul is saying that as a Christian, you have been built on the foundation of love. Love is the foundation upon which your spiritual life has been founded upon. It's what holds you up. That's what Paul is saying here. Now, we have to ask: what kind of love can stabilize and support a person's entire spiritual life?

What kind of love can do that? What kind of love must this be? Well, in Greek, there are a few different words that could be translated into love. First, there is, I have to say, we had a pastor here for 40 years, and many of y'all probably never met him, but his name is Clyde, and he'd be very proud of me right now because I took Greek from him.

He taught Greek, and almost every sermon that he would preach would be on the four uses, the four Greek words of love. So here we go. I'm going to. Make him smile. But there's four words. The first is philo. Philo, it's a friendly love. And it's a love that you would have for a friend.

Think of Philadelphia, right? The city of brotherly love. It's a friendly love. The second is storgy, and it carries the idea of a familial love, a love for family, affection for one another. The third is the word eros, and this expresses a possessive love. It often refers to a physical love, a selfish love, a love that only loves that which it deems worthy to be loved.

Eros, that's that kind of love. And fourthly, or lastly, there's a word for love that is used here: the word agape. Agape. It's an agape love. Perhaps you've heard of it. Now, this is a unique kind of love. It's not the kind of love that we often talk about today or hear talked about today.

It's not the kind of love that we see often displayed in the world. Our brother from California, I don't know if he's here this morning, Bill Foote, he describes it this way: it's not a sloppy agape. That's what he called it in the Pastor's Institute this past week.

I told him I'd use this in my sermon somehow. Not a sloppy agape. It's not a kind of love that's sloppy love. But it's a love that is often used to speak of God's attribute of love. It speaks of God's love towards Himself within the Trinity, between God the Father and the Son and the Spirit.

It's a love that speaks of God's love towards humans, as well as humans' love towards God and towards each other. It's the same kind of love that 1 Corinthians 13 speaks of, that's not jealous or boastful or arrogant or disgraceful or selfish or irritable or unrighteous, but rather it is a love that is patient and kind and enduring.

It's a love that is given regardless of a person's merit. It's a love that desires to give rather than extract. It's a love that seeks the highest and greatest good of the one being loved. That's the kind of love that is spoken of here. It's a divine love.

It's a love that originates from God and not from man. And it's the only kind of love in which the Christian has been rooted and grounded upon. It's the only kind of love that can stabilize your soul and nourish it. And it's the only kind of love that can support you and hold you up in your spiritual life.

Life. This is the kind of love that Paul is referring to here. And so, what Paul is saying is that your spiritual condition, being rooted and grounded in love, your spiritual status as a Christian, is fundamental to understanding the love of Christ for which he is praying. If you're going to understand anything at all about the love of Christ, you must be rooted and grounded in this kind of love.

You must be a Christian. And so, this morning, I ask you, have you been rooted and grounded in God's love? Does this kind of agape love characterize your love for God and your love for his people? Does that describe who you are? Is that a reflection of the kind of love that you possess?

This is the kind of love that you must have if God is going to answer this prayer for spiritual understanding in your life. So, again, Paul says, Because you're a Christian and because you have been rooted and grounded in love, I bow my knees before the Father and I make this bold request on your behalf.

That's the basis of his request. And at the time we have left together, I want to look at the content. I want to look at the content. Of Paul's request found in verse 18. It says, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge.

The first thing that I want you to see here is the heart of Paul's request. What is it that Paul was asking God specifically to do for them? What was he praying for? Well, there are two main expressions here that really capture the heart of his request. It says, I bow my knees before the Father so that you, number one, may be able to comprehend.

Number one, and number two, that you may be able to know. To comprehend and to know. Well, this first expression is made up of two words. The first one occurs only here in the New Testament. And it literally means to have enough strength or to have enough ability to do something.

That you may be able, that you may have enough ability, enough strength to accomplish something or do something. And here, again, it's very similar to his request before, that you would have the ability to act or the strength to act, is similar request. What is the something that he is asking God to give them strength for?

That they would be able to comprehend. To comprehend. That word literally. means to seize or to lay hold of. Let me give you an example. It's found in Mark 9, verse 18. You don't necessarily need to turn there, but in Mark 9, 18, this is a passage where a young boy was brought to Jesus, and he was possessed by a demon.

And it says that that demon made him mute and that whenever it seized him, whenever it took hold of him and grabbed him, it slammed him to the ground. That's the idea here, to comprehend, right? To grab something and to take hold of it, not in a literal sense, but in a mental sense, with your mind.

To grab hold of something with your mind. That's the idea. And it's something extremely important that Paul has in view here, to grab hold of something. He prays that they would have that strength to understand and to comprehend. The second expression can be seen in verse 19. Verse 19, he uses a different word to advance the same idea, and that is to know.

He wants you to be able to know something. Now, in a general sense, it simply means to acquire knowledge, to know or to acquire knowledge. But in a more particular sense, it's speaking of a personal knowledge, an intimate knowledge of something. These are not just facts. He's not praying that God would give them the facts about something, but a personality.

Personal knowledge that comes about through a relationship with a person. Again, an example of this can be seen at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7, where Jesus responds to the self-righteous Pharisees. He says this, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, not everyone who says, I know you, Lord, don't I know you, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter. And many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?

And in your name, cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles? Didn't we know you? And Jesus says in verse 23, I will declare to them, I never knew you. Didn't know you. Didn't have a personal relationship with you. That's the idea here in Ephesians of what Paul is praying for.

He's wanting a personal, intimate knowledge, not a knowledge of human facts. And this really is the heart and the purpose behind Paul's request. He's praying so that God would give these believers in Ephesus the ability and the strength to mentally grasp the incredible truths that he is about to pray for.

That they would obtain a real and personal knowledge of it. The next thing that you need to notice about this request is the object of the request. Notice what it is that Paul desired for the church to comprehend and to know. He prayed that he would give them the strength and the ability to know the love of Christ.

To know the love of Christ. This is the great object of Paul's request. And it's what he wants every Christian here this morning to grasp with their minds and to take hold of in their hearts. The love of Christ. Now, what does he want us to know about the love of Christ?

What specifically? There are two descriptions that you can see in your text, two things that, two ways that Paul describes the love of Christ. Both of them speak of the infinite magnitude and the limitless capacity of Christ's love for us. Notice the first one. First one is found in those four dimensions where he says the breadth and the length and the height and the depth.

It says that the love of Christ is a multidimensional love. Multi-dimensional. What does that mean? Well, as you can see there from the text, he lists four different dimensions to describe the love of Christ, four words. That are simply words of measurement. And I think we're familiar with these.

You have the breadth or the width of an object. This is how wide something is. It measures the width. You have a length, how long, distance from end to end, how long is an object. You've got the height, which measures how high up it goes. And you have the depth, which measures how deep it goes.

So there are these four dimensions that Paul gives here, and these four dimensions have generated quite a lot of discussion and come up with a lot of rather unique interpretations of what Paul is referring to here. For example, some have seen it as describing the dimensions of God's spiritual temple, the temple being the church.

The idea being that since God's temple, as described in Revelation, has the dimensions of a cube, length, width, height, and that since Paul refers to the church as God's spiritual temple in Ephesians 2, therefore, that's what Paul is describing here. He's measuring out the dimensions of the spiritual temple, the church.

Interesting, to say the least. I don't think it really fits the context of what is being spoken of here in Paul's prayer, but some of the commentators go there. Others suggest that Paul is drawing. A cross or referencing the image of a cross. We have a cross right up there, right?

And you can imagine, see if I have a, yeah, there we go. Start here in the middle, right? And you have the width, and you have the length, right, this horizontal axis here, and you start here from the middle, and you go up, there's the height, you go down, there's the depth, and you have a cross.

And they, again, they give some elaborate discussions on what each of those dimensions mean or are. And while those are all needs to think about and insightful, I don't believe that's what was on Paul's mind here. I don't think he was drawing a cross or measuring out the temple or the church.

He doesn't seem to be trying to make a distinction really between these four elements or measurements, but rather he's speaking of them together as a whole to describe the vastness and the completeness of Christ's love. Let me read how John MacArthur put it in his commentary. I'll read it to you because he put it together well.

He says, This, Christ's love is a love that goes in every direction and into the greatest distance. It goes wherever it is needed for as long as it is needed. In whatever spiritual direction we look, we can see. God's love. We can see love's breadth reflected in God's acceptance of the Gentile and the Jew equally in Christ.

We can see its length in God's choosing us before the foundation of the world for salvation that lasts through all eternity. We can see love's height in God's having blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places and is raising us up and seating us with him in the heavenly places in Christ.

We can see love's depth in God reaching down to the lowest levels of depravity to redeem those who are dead in their trespasses and sins. You see, God's love can reach any person in any sin, and it stretches from eternity past to eternity future. And it takes us into the very presence of God and sets us on his throne.

That's how MacArthur puts it. See, Christ's love is multi-dimensional, it is vast beyond measure. In fact, it can't be fully measured. You cannot fully grasp or wrap your mind around and fully take hold of the love of Christ. That's the idea here that Paul is communicating. Now, where might we see this multidimensional love on display?

I mean, where do we go to begin to grasp? This kind of measureless love. Notice what he says in the text. Paul prays for them to be able to comprehend the breadth and the length and the depth and the height with all the saints. With all the saints.

You need to understand that the vastness of the love of Christ cannot be comprehended apart from the body of Christ, apart from the saints in the church. You see, the church, the collection of God's people, is Christ's love on display. It is Christ's measureless love on display. Friends, look around.

Look around you this morning. What do you see? You see the saints. You see individuals that have been chosen by God. Individuals that have been set apart for his glorious purposes. You see individuals who have been rooted and grounded in God's love for them. You see individuals that are reflecting the love of Christ.

See, each and every one of them, each and every one of you from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different stories, each with your own unique story of God's love, of Christ being poured out into your life. You know what? You want to To know what one of my favorite parts of being an elder in this church, it's got to be reading the testimonies of the applications of the members.

I think the other elders would agree. It's one of our favorite things to do when someone wants to join this church and they complete the membership application. They write their testimony of how God has been kind and loving to them. And when they come for baptisms, they come up here and they give their testimony and they proclaim to all of us the great and vast love that God has for his people.

And so I just absolutely treasure those testimonies of the saints because they continually remind me of the vastness of God's love in Christ. They remind me that Christ's love can reach any person, including me, including you, and it can cover any sin. And then, to think that all of you are just some of the saints.

Just some. Paul says, all the saints. We see the vastness of the love of Christ in all of it. We are just a sampling. This church is just a sample, a glimpse of the vastness of Christ. When you consider the fact that Paul mentions all the saints, every saint, every Christian, every person that has ever been.

Been rooted and grounded in love from every tribe, from every tongue, from every nation, it absolutely overwhelms the mind. Staggering. It's impossible to fully comprehend the magnitude and the vastness and the fullness of Christ's love. There's no way to calculate it, it's immeasurable. And it's because of this vastness that Paul prayed that God would help them to understand it.

And we must pray that God would help us to understand it with all the saints. There's a second description that Paul gives for the love of Christ. You see it in verse 19. He prays that you would be able to know and experience the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge.

Literally means to throw beyond knowledge. You can think, it was often used of like a javelin contest. You know, our kids are in track right now. They have the javelin, the spear throwing. You throw a spear, and then someone else comes up and tries to throw the spear beyond the last person.

That's the idea. Throw beyond knowledge. You could say it like this: the love of Christ exceeds the limits of what can be known. Exceeds the limits. Christ's love takes you to the very limits of human comprehension. And then it goes beyond that. It keeps going, and it keeps going, and it keeps going.

You see that? It surpasses knowledge. Incredible prayer. Pray is the impossible. It's kind of hard for us to understand this, I think. I came across an illustration this week that helped me at least catch a glimpse, maybe, of what Paul is describing here. It's really not an analogy that can perfectly or adequately describe this truth, but this is the best that I could find.

I want you to think about something. Think about the average lifespan of a car. Anybody know what that is? How many years an average lifespan of a car is? I'll tell you. It's 12 to 15 years. That's the average. Now, it's not the average that I think most people keep their car, apparently.

They trade them in every so often, but if you were to take a car and drive it brand new until it died, about 12 to 15 years, longer on average, but roughly 150,000, 200,000 miles. They seem to be going longer maybe these days, but let's just say about 150,000, 200,000 miles to complete the lifespan of a vehicle.

Now, I want you to imagine if you could travel the distance of 200,000 miles, not in 12 to 15 years, not in a month or a day, but in one second. If you go about 200,000 miles in one second, you would be going the speed of light. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.

And if you were to leave here this morning and go get in your car, it would take you 1.3 seconds at the speed of light to get to the moon. Pretty fast. It would take you about eight minutes, maybe a little over eight minutes, to get to the sun.

It would take you seven hours at that speed to get to the edge of our solar system, to the very edge of our solar system. And our solar system, of course, is in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, some scientists have estimated that if you could travel at the speed of light from one end of our galaxy to the other, right, from edge to edge, it would take you 100,000 years at the speed of light to go from one edge of our galaxy to the other edge.

And then if you were to go beyond that, there are millions of other galaxies beyond that. In fact, I was reading an article from NASA. This was dated several years back, so it's probably more than this now, but at the time, their research had shown, their findings, that there were more than 200 billion other galaxies in the universe, and that's just what can be observed.

200 billion galaxies. Staggering. I mean, let's talk about something that's mind-blowing. That is hard to fathom. But Paul says that the love of Christ is like that. You see, when the scientists look through those fancy telescopes, the more that they see, the more they realize there's more to be seen.

The more they discover about our universe and the depth of it, the more they realize there's more. And they keep going beyond, and it keeps pushing beyond the limits of human knowledge. And Christ's love, as best we can describe it, is kind of like that, only more. It surpasses knowledge.

The love of Christ pushes us beyond the limits of human comprehension. And it just keeps going and going and going and going. And the more that you know of it and the more that you experience it in your life, the more there is to know. You never get to the end of it.

And this is the prayer that Paul prays for the believers, for the church. It's the prayer that we must pray for ourselves, that God would help us understand the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge. That He would enable us to comprehend even a fraction of these things. And we must ask, where in the world can we see a Love like this on display.

Where can we see a love that surpasses knowledge, that defies human knowledge? It's only on the cross. On the cross, you can see a love like this. Paul says in Romans 5, verse 6, it says, For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

And in verse 8, God demonstrates his own love towards us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. See, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was God's chosen means to demonstrate his love for us. It is his proof that he loves you. And it's the greatest demonstration that the world will ever see.

Listen to Jesus' own words in John 15, verse 13, where he says, Greater love has no one than this than to lay down his life for his friends. Jesus laid down his life for us. And there is no greater display of Christ's love than when he died on that cross for our sins, for your sins, for my sins.

Because it is here that the only sinless man to ever live was slain for guilty sinners. It is here where the only righteous one was punished for our unrighteous deeds. It is here at the cross where God's own Son willingly endured a sinner's death in order that he might be our substitute.

And it's here where Jesus Christ fully absorbed the wrath of God that you and I deserved. You see, the love of Christ, it was the love of Christ that kept him on that cross to the very end, until it was finished, until it was completed. John 13 says this: that Jesus, knowing that his hour had come and that he would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, that's us, he loved them to the end, to the very end, to the uttermost.

Jesus loved you to the end. Listen, if you want to grow in your understanding of the love of Christ, this love, you must look at the cross. You must come to the cross. If you want to grasp Christ's love for you, if you want to experience this kind of love in your life, you must come and spend much time at the cross of Christ.

You must spend much time there. You must linger there, marveling at the surpassing greatness of his love for you. Friends, this was Paul's prayer. For the church is my prayer for all of you this morning that you would just catch a glimpse of the love of Christ, that God would strengthen or give you the ability to understand it just a little more.

Maybe you're here this morning, and perhaps all this talk about love and God's love and the love of Christ doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you. Maybe that's you this morning. Maybe you can't seem to comprehend it. And if that's true of you, I either have done a poor job explaining it, which is entirely possible, or it's that you need to be established in God's love.

You need to be grounded in it and rooted in it. You need to have your life founded upon it. And if that's true of you this morning, I invite you to pray and just ask God to pour out His love into your heart. Ask God to bring this about in your life, to show you, to open your eyes to His great love for you, and that He would give you a desire to come to Him and to love Him.

Well, maybe there's others here this morning who are questioning God's love in their life. Maybe you're questioning it. Maybe you're struggling to believe that the love of Christ can really cover your sins. Perhaps you think you've sinned too greatly for Christ to love you. Let me tell you this morning, there's good news.

It is impossible to outsin the love of Christ. You simply cannot do that. His love is so vast and so great that it covers every sin of every person who would ever come to him. And if you would just come to him this morning, he would cover your sin in his love.

His love covers a multitude of sins. And maybe you're here this morning and you have known Christ for many years. You've been walking with Christ. You know Christ. You love Christ, but you want to know him more. You love him, but you want to love him more, and you want to know his love in a greater way.

If that's you, then I ask you to pray, like Paul prayed in Ephesians 3: pray that God would strengthen you and that he would give you the ability to comprehend his love in a greater way. He would give you a deeper love for Christ. That was my prayer for you this morning, and pray that God would do it.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we do, we cast ourselves at your feet. At the cross, we bow before you and acknowledge our need of you. We acknowledge our need of your love, and we acknowledge our dependence upon you to. Give us the ability to even see a fraction of it.

And so, Father, like Paul prayed this morning, I pray that you would bring that about in each and every one of the lives here this morning. God, may through your Spirit, may you be at work and come and dwell in our hearts. Pour your love in our hearts this morning.

In Jesus' name, amen.