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”.
