The Fruit of the Spirit is...Love 💕

“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure with all the fullness of God.”

Ephesians 3:17-19

I collapsed onto the couch one Saturday night in October, realizing it had been a while since I’d prayed. The “prayer” that followed was basically a monologue - me presenting a laundry lists of requests, almost as if God is a vending machine (which He is not). I was sharing my concerns over my kids and lots of future things. All of the future things. When I finally finished my speech, I waited eagerly for a response (and I hoped it would be as specific as possible).

And here’s what I heard (in a gentle and quiet whisper sort of way):

“Oh, how I love you, Morgan.”

It’s not at all what I thought He’d say.

There I was, waiting for details and an action plan, and He told me that He loves me. And He called me by name. I couldn't stop crying as He continued to express His love towards me.

He wanted to show me, speak to me and shower me with love and He wanted it to sink in all the way to the very depths of my being.

I could hardly handle it.

I think, for those of us who grew up in the church, we are so accustomed to hearing about how much God loves us. Some of us have heard it a million times, and so we shrug when we hear it. We “know” God loves us.

We are in desperate need of a fresh revelation of God’s love for us. In our world today, we are weary, overstimulated, and spiritually malnourished. We are too busy, and yet simultaneously bored. We are not easily impressed, but we are itching for something more, something deeper than what’s been offered to us. We “know” a lot of things, but they often don’t make the long journey from our heads to our hearts.

God desires so much more for us - He wants us to know His love in a real, experiential way so that it sinks into our very bones and beings. This is why He sends us the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children,” (Romans 8:16) taking the love of the Father from our heads and pouring it out into our hearts (Romans 5:5).

Dane Ortlund explains it this way in his book Gentle and Lowly (a BEAUTIFUL book): “It is one thing, as a child, to be told your father loves you. You believe him. You take him at his word. But it is another thing, unutterably more real, to be swept up in his embrace, to feel the warmth, to hear his beating heart within his chest, to instantly know the protective grip of his arms. It’s one thing to hear he loves you; it’s another thing to feel his love. This is the glorious work of the Spirit” (122).

I’ve found it true, what Ortlund says: “We are factories of fresh resistances to Christ’s love” (Gentle and Lowly, 63). We come up with excuses why God couldn’t or shouldn’t love us. Shame and guilt hold us back from experiencing the depths of God’s love. We distract ourselves or fill our lives so that we have no time to sit with God and experience His love. We would never call ourselves, as John did, “the disciple whom Jesus love[s]” (John 13:23).

This saddens our Father greatly. Our inability to receive God’s love and experience its fullness stunts our growth, keeps us from goodness, and limits our intimacy with God. Without intending to, we keep God at an arm’s length when we refuse to receive His love for us.

On the contrary, something powerful happens when we know and understand (experientially, not just intellectually) how great the love of God is for us (on a personal level, not just universally). Paul asserts in Ephesians 3: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure with all the fullness of God” (v. 17-19).

When we grasp the love of God for us, we will be “filled to the measure with all the fullness of God.” That means we will be so filled to overflowing with all that the Spirit has to offer us that there won’t be room for anything else - doubt, fear, wayward identities or sin. Being “filled to the measure with all the fullness of God” means that nothing unwanted can find its way in, and that the lies of the enemy will be forced out.

How we need to grasp this inconceivable Love in greater measure! And we need to ask for His help in this - we need Him to reveal His love to us. We need Him to remind us of who He is. We need help to remember who we were and where we were heading before He intervened so that we can respond appropriately - like the woman who broke the alabaster jar at Jesus’ feet (Luke 7). We need Him to help us to stop resisting the love of God and start receiving it.

Ephesians 3:17-19 is the passage I pray over my children every night. I believe it could change their lives (and all of our lives) if we were to more fully understand the love of the Father for us. I’m praying this passage over you today - may the Spirit make His love more real to you today, in the depths of your soul, as you seek Him.