-Here now we ascend into the rarified air of God’s breathtaking goodness, a place where finite fallen man can 1) know that which Paul says surpasses knowing, and thus 2) be filled will all the fullness of the infinite God Himself. Inconceivable. No, neither one is conceptually possible, and yet Paul is still praying this for these believers.
-Having begun with a foundation of love and proceeding to being able to somehow apprehend the immensity of God’s everlasting love for us, we now are brought to the point of actually knowing what is beyond knowing, the love of Christ, knowing just how much He loves us, arms stretched wide, nailed to the cross, embracing an entire world of lost souls. Not merely knowing facts about love or some textbook definition of it - we’re talking about internal, intimate first-hand experience, an internal comprehension of that which is beyond comprehending. And it’s not simply knowing that God is love or that He loves us when we’re good and do the things we supposedly should, but He has always and will always love us, even when we are bad, when we lie and cheat and steal, when we are unloving and unkind and impatient, when we love other people and other things more than Him, even when we were His enemies and objects of wrath - I know that I know that I know that He loves me, always has, always will, loving us with an immeasurable uncontainable everlasting love. He made us, He designed us - to live forever with Him in glorious breathtaking goodness. And now He woos us with the same love and care and concern that any artist would have for one of their priceless designs. Love like this is the ultimate motivator. It grips and compels us, drawing us upward to our eternal home and spurring us forward to live for eternity in the ephemeral now.
-But it is somehow being able to grasp the enormity of this love of Christ which enables us to be finally and fully filled up to all the fullness of God. An awesome byproduct of this is that He is then what spills out. What fills me not only controls me, but it is what spills out of me. If I am filled with anger, anger controls me and then spills out of me. Uncontainable. But consider what Paul says here - to be filled unto all the fullness of God. Here again we have something which is conceptually impossible. You cannot fill a finite space - me - with an infinite. And yet this is precisely what Paul has in mind. So what we wind up with is a life literally bursting at the seams with the divine, uncontainable, inexplicable, irrepressible, unrestrained and unleashed on an unsuspecting world in and through said life - could be any one of us, and should be, if Christ actually does dwell therein.
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