{"id":7447,"date":"2017-09-14T00:49:21","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T00:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/?p=7447"},"modified":"2017-12-14T03:01:43","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T03:01:43","slug":"grasping-the-infinite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/grasping-the-infinite\/","title":{"rendered":"Grasping the Infinite"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Dan Jones<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">If you&#8217;ve been listening to Kinship Christian Radio lately, you&#8217;ve probably heard the song, &#8220;Gloria&#8221; by Stephen Christian which begins with the simple line &#8220;God is infinite.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">Which got me to thinking about this beautiful prayer Paul writes to the Ephesians:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">\u00a0<strong>I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,\u00a0so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,\u00a0may have power, together with all the Lord\u2019s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,\u00a0and to know this love that surpasses knowledge\u2014that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,\u00a0to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (vs. 3:16-21, NIV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">It&#8217;s filled with long, rambling phrases\u00a0with far too many commas and dependent clauses and it\u00a0would most certainly send the average ninth-grade English teacher into a red Sharpie hissy-fit, but it is a gorgeous prayer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">And, right in the middle of it, Paul prays that the Ephesians would &#8220;grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ&#8230;&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">He&#8217;s writing as if Christ&#8217;s love had physical dimensions. Never mind that <em>no one&#8217;s<\/em> love has physical dimensions in the first place, he&#8217;s praying that the Ephesians would be able to fully comprehend the love of the God who would willing die on the cross to save everyone ever born from all the sins they would ever commit. And he doesn&#8217;t stop with just praying that they would be able to understand how big that love is, he asks that they would comprehend it&#8217;s width, it&#8217;s length, it&#8217;s height, and it&#8217;s depth.\u00a0As if three dimension&#8217;s weren&#8217;t enough, Paul has included a fourth!<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">In other words, Paul is praying the Ephesians would be able to comprehend the infinite.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">And, if you back-track that sentence, you<\/span><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">\u00a0find that Paul is not just praying it for the Ephesians, he&#8217;s praying it for &#8220;all the Lord&#8217;s holy people.&#8221; And that sounds like it includes you and me &#8211;and every Christian ever born!<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">Going back even further into the sentence, we find that Paul is praying that the power to comprehend that\u00a0infinite love of Christ is rooted and established in love, which then fills us with a love that surpasses knowledge, which (by the time we get to the end of the sentence) is filling us to measure of all the fullness of God Himself.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">There&#8217;s infinity all over this prayer, as if God is not constrained in His almighty\u00a0love by time, space, height, depth, length, width, or <em>any other physical dimension<\/em> we care to name.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;\">And that&#8217;s some awfully good stuff to remember when some tiny little temporary\u00a0problem with actual physical dimensions falls into your lap.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">Today&#8217;s Praise<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">&#8220;But will God really dwell on earth with humans? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built! \u00a02 Chronicles 6:18 (NIV)<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Dan Jones &nbsp; If you&#8217;ve been listening to Kinship Christian Radio lately, you&#8217;ve probably heard the song, &#8220;Gloria&#8221; by Stephen Christian which begins with the simple line &#8220;God is&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 14:57:29","action":"delete","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}