Going Off the Deep End

You’re going off the deep end.  Have you ever heard that before?  I have and it is usually in a negative way.  What if we thought about going off the deep end of God’s love?  Listen to Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, “may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.”(3:18) 

Have you ever thought about how BIG God’s love for us is?  Frances Chan called it “crazy Love” and even named one of his books with this title.  I am not calling God crazy, nor is Chan, but it is crazy how amazingly big God’s love for us is. Paul tries to put it into words we could understand.  He uses the dimensions we use for ordinary things, width, length, height and depth.  I am not sure we can fully understand it in this way though.  Can you imagine how deep the ocean is?  If you can, then you might get close to understanding the depth of God’s love.  Micah explains that God “will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (7:19).  That must be pretty deep. 

David seeks to explain a little bit about the width of God’s love in Psalm 103:12.  “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.”  Since that is a distance that is impossible to measure, that too is a long way. 

When we think about the height of God’s love… how might we explain it?  My daughter and I like to say, “I love you to the stars and back” or “to the sun and back,” but that doesn’t seem to give the love of God justice.  God loves us all the way to Heaven where we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith.” (1 Peter 1:4)  I have always imagined Heaven as being pretty high, haven’t you?

The depth of God’s love brings us back to “going off the deep end”.  That’s exactly what God did for us through Jesus.  He loved us all the way to this sinful earth.  God was willing to love us all the way up to the cruel cross and back down to the depth of the grave.  God died for you and me.  Paul once again summed this up for us in Philippians 2:5-8.  “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”  God loved us that deeply.

God’s love is amazing, crazy and yes, unconditional.  Did you notice something there from Philippians?  We too are to have that same attitude of love.  I think I will keep working on that while I fall off the deep end into the unfailing love of God.

God Bless!