A FURIOUS LOVE

“THAT YOU, BEING ROOTED AND GROUNDED IN LOVE, MAY BE ABLE TO COMPREHEND WITH ALL THE SAINTS WHAT IS THE BREADTH AND LENGTH AND HEIGHT AND DEPTH, AND TO KNOW THE LOVE OF CHRIST WHICH SURPASSES KNOWLEDGE, THAT YOU MAY BE FILLED UP TO ALL THE FULLNESS OF GOD. " – Ephesians 3:17-19

These words once meant nothing special to me, they were just ink on thin paper. Vague and glossed over words that I had no true understanding of. Yet, there was a time, years and years ago after this where I thought I did understand this love, I spoke about it and sang of it often. But the dragons came, long neglected hurts buried for years were rooted out by church hurt that spun me out into deep spiritual crisis. These words then lost all meaning to me.

I doubted that they were no longer meant for me because I felt that I had fallen out of His good graces. I had broken faith with Him and I cast myself out to the desert where I had lived for decades. Eking out an existence where my relationship was defined by sitting within a pew on Sunday mornings where I longed for something more but always came back home unfulfilled and empty.

Within that desert land He began calling again and whispering to me about this love, calling me to come and find a deeper understanding of it. My pain though kept me from believing that He truly loved me and I wrestled and fought with it. This love was what GK Chesterton called, The Furious Love of God. The author Brennan Manning elaborated often on this and wrote of the “vastness and depth and strength of the God of Jesus seeking union with us.”

He spoke of a God that wasn’t “moody or capricious; who knows no seasons of change.” A God that is of one single and relentless drive towards us. He passionately and wildly loves us. He wildly loves you and He wildly love me. This God, the only God in a world of lesser man-made gods are fickle and give blessings only when sacrifice and worship are given them. And then at best we have their tolerant approval.

No. This is the only God who loves sinners in all their folly, misdirection and pain. The reality of this truth is deep and it is vast in the significance of His love. It evades our rational minds. We cannot accept that He loves us to such a weighty degree. We try to relate and understand and accept that love and reason it as we would the merits of how we would love another who isn’t our blood kin. We often have that form of obedient outward godliness but we deny the reality of it all by hearts that are weak and broken.

Manning in his book The furious Longing of God writes, “If you took the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love and united these qualities in a single person, that person’s love would only be a faint shadow of the furious love and mercy in the heart of God the Father.”

But what would happen with us if we decided to believe the truth of this? We believe this intellectually because He has told us this. But within the deep and silent room of our hearts do we really believe it?

It has nothing to do about what you can bargain for and it has nothing to do with how good you are. You don’t measure up to His standards of love and you never will. But it was never about measuring up or being good enough.

We are like small dinghies, cast onto a sea rifled about by storms and beaten over by it’s crashing waves. It is a force so great you doubt your very survival and you hang desperately on. This, this is the love of God.

Our pastors and priests have painted this love as some flowery, mollycoddled thing. A love gentle and weak as thin tea. But the reality though is His love is an all-consuming fire, a love that will go to any lengths, take any risk, a love that is fully no holds-barred. A love that gave up glory and all the wonders of heaven to be shod in a frail body and dumped into a broken world where love is nothing if not temperamental and always given to flights of unstable volatility.

Those few years back though I tested the waters of these words. I was a man broken by pain and distrustful of those around me. But then something amazing and wonderful happened. I set my feet into those waters and lost all footing on those slippery shores and fell fully into His ocean. I was overcome by the reality of this furious love. And I tell you, I surrendered to it, I have been overtaken and have drowned in its depths. I have been caught up, I have been seized by what the songwriter Andrew Peterson calls, The Power of a Great Affection. That Furious and relentless and driving love has now become the theme of my life.

My prayer for you today friend is that you come to know the reality of that furious and dangerous love. That you on your own little boat become overcome and seized by it. That you capsize within His sea. That you no longer fight it but that you drown within those waters and come away changed. That you see with new eyes and experience wonder and joy in the every day. That you see with new eyes exactly how Elisha’s servant had seen.

That you as Paul prayed would be able to accept and comprehend what is that boundless and unending fury that is His love. A love beyond all knowledge or tradition or legalism, a love that exceeds far past our preconceptions. A love beyond fickle reality and preconceived man-made notions.

Come to the edge of the shores of that raging sea. Don’t think about it but trust that despite the passion of those ferocious waves sending sea spray over you that you will be alright. It will be better and exciting. I pray that you will come away made new, with fresh eyes and heart. And may you know that Love that surpasses all knowledge and that you may come to be filled up to all the fullness of our great and good God.