Proper 12B, 2024
Text: Ephesians 3:14-21
Title: Measuring Love
+ INI +
How do you measure love?
The short answer is that you can’t, of course, but we still try to measure love, don’t we?
When you’re young, you measure love in cookies and toys and other forms of attention. If mom and dad are smiling at you and paying attention to you and giving you as many presents as your brothers and sisters, then you know that they love you, right?
As you grow older, you still measure love in this way. How many Valentines did you get? How many times were you asked out for homecoming or prom? How long do you have to wait until the one you love texts you back?
And it never stops, does it? What did you get for your last anniversary? How often is “date night” observed? How often do your kids or grandkids call (if they still remember that their phones can actually be used for placing phone calls).
How do you measure how much your family, your beloved, your friends, or even your pastor loves you?
The problem with all this measuring of love, of course, is that it’s centered on me. What do I get out of these relationships? How do they benefit me? How do they make me feel important, needed, desired?
As long as love is about me and what I get out of it, it’s not really love.
If you want to know what love looks like, look to Christ, look to the cross.
What did He get out of sacrificing His life for you?
Nothing.
Jesus died forsaken, alone, naked, in the dark. He got nothing out of it. And yet, this was the most loving act of all time.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians and for you is that you would be “rooted and grounded in love,” and that you “may have strength to comprehend… what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
God is love. That love was shown to you in Christ. If you are in Christ, that means that you are filled with His love.
Paul’s prayer begins by asking God that you would be rooted and grounded in love.
The love that you receive from God is the starting point for everything that you do. Your first reaction to anyone, no matter how mean, how annoying, how terribly awful they are to you, your first reaction to them should be one of love.
Jesus says to love your enemies. Jesus forgave even those who were nailing Him to the cross.
And that goes for you, too, who have been loved in such a way.
Your natural instinct is going to be the exact opposite of love. You will be tempted to act out of hatred and fear.
That’s how everyone around you acts, don’t they? If someone insults you, you insult them right back. If someone hurts you, you hurt them back, harder. If someone hurts your loved ones, then watch out!
In this world you will suffer. That’s what it means to belong to Christ. You have no control over how people will treat you. But you do have control over how you will react, how you will respond to the hatred and the insults.
Paul prays that you will respond in the way of love.
And that is where true strength lies.
The reason why Paul prays that you will know the love of Christ is so that you will have strength in the day of persecution.
Strength comes not from responding in the way of force. Strength comes from responding in the way of love.
And the only way that you can do this is if you truly know the love of Christ.
“To know,” means more than just understanding with your brain. It means more than just figuring it out in some sort of logical way. Paul says that “the love of Christ… surpasses knowledge.”
“To know,” means to experience for yourself. The only way that you can be loving is if you yourself have first experienced the love of Christ for yourself.
Unless you see yourself as a hopeless sinner, unless you recognize how lost you are without Christ, you will never be ready to love.
Apart from Christ, you are no better than your enemies. You are no better than those who hate you and work against you.
There’s a line in the rite of private confession that goes like this, “I have not let His love have its way with me, and so my love for others has failed.” “I have not let His love have its way with me, and so my love for others has failed.”
If you don’t recognize how much God has loved you, you will never be able to truly love your neighbor.
However, once you see how lost you truly are, and how much you need Christ, you will see yourself in your neighbor.
Once you experience the all-encompassing love of Christ, its height, its depth, its width, and its breadth, once you experience this love that is beyond your ability to comprehend, only then will you be prepared to love those around you with this same love.
Think about how much God loves you.
If you minimize that love, if you say to yourself, “I’m a decent person. I’m generous and kind and treat other people well. I might need a little fixing up from time to time, but I’m doing okay,” if that’s your attitude, you will never receive the full love of Christ, and so you will never give the full love of Christ.
But if you say, “I’m totally lost and helpless on my own. I can’t do anything right. I’m constantly failing to live up to who God has made me to be. If it were not for Christ and His death for me, in my place, I would be damned eternally.” Once you are in that place, once you recognize how much Jesus loves you, then you will be ready to love other people, even those who hate you.
How do you measure love?
You can’t, of course.
But if you experience the love of Christ, if you are filled with the fullness of God, then you will be ready to love in this same selfless way. Not by counting and keeping track of cookies or phone calls or presents, but by loving other people, no matter who they are, in the way that God in Christ loves you.
That’s not possible on your own, but only as God is at work in you.
What Paul prays for here is a miracle. But you have a God who is able to do miracles, just like this.
“Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”