A Reflection on Love.

Written and published by Jean-Louis Mondon

Love always hopes. When everything seems hopeless to the world, the Christian has hope in God working out His will and plan for the ultimate best.

We can do more than praying after we have prayed.

We cannot do more than praying until we have prayed.

In Corinthians, we have love defined by its nature and principles, in Ephesians Paul calls the believers to understand and grow into the dimensional aspect of love.

The Corinthians being immature needed to learn the ABCs, the rudiments of doctrine, they needed things to be spelled out for them.

In Corinthians 10:7, Paul tells them: You are looking only on the surface of things.

Again in 2 Cor 3:15 he tells them: “So fix your eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal”.

In 2 Cor 5:12, he talks about those who take pride in what is seen rather than what is in the heart.

The Corinthians had all the external trappings of religion, the experience of the emotional release that can be found in and is similar to any gathering of people coming together for whatever the happening is football game, movie, circus, concert, etc.

The danger present in the situation is that they would revert back to the kind of worship and life style that was prevalent in Corinth among the pagan cults they came out of and wouldn’t know the difference.

This is why Paul took time to explain to them the principles of godly agape love, not some kind of philosophical, cerebral, ethereal, or emotional kind of love, but a love that has practical application in its outward manifestation as willful and deliberate attitudes of the heart, a relational love resulting in works of love.

Now contrast this with the prayer found in Ephesians 3:16 through 3:19

Paul's Prayer for the Ephesians

I ask that out of the riches of His glory He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being,17so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth 19of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.…

If in Corinthians Paul writes about the nature of love and what to do, in Ephesians, he writes about the dimensional aspect of love and how this love is manifested.

The qualities and nature of Christ’s love as it is expressed through the believer’s life have width, length, height and depth which implies the ability to be measured and the possibility of increasing.

Sometimes, time and space which we consider to be limitations in the natural state of man can be turned around for our ultimate good and our benefit in the development of the qualities of love, if we understand them properly and apply them accordingly in their dimensional aspects and grow into “being filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” that Paul speaks of in Ephesians 3:19.

Psalms 71 declares:“My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long though I do not know its measure”.