| How's Your Comprehension? - article by Joel Hempel
Quite frankly, academic comprehension was a challenge for me throughout most of my undergraduate studies – until I met Marcia. Go figure! In Ephesians 3:18-19, St. Paul prays that Christians then and now would have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth [of God’s love], and to know [the] love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Although my comprehension improved after meeting Marcia, I still struggled to appreciate the magnitude of God’s love for you and me. Understandably! Notice the oxymoron Paul uses when he implores us to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge! God’s love for us is beyond human understanding because it doesn’t make sense how the Creator of the Universe can be so much in love with people who were and continue to be oppositional. God wants us to know that although we cannot know what surpasses human understanding, He surely wants us to invest ourselves in trying. God inspired biblical authors to write about his love for us so we would read and absorb the fullness of His love for us (see Micah 7:18-19; Romans 8:38-39; Ephesians 2:4-6; 1 John 4:8-10).
God inspired poets and musicians to create love songs and hymns that lift us out of ourselves and into the arms of God (e.g., Love Divine, All Loves Excelling by Charles Wesley; My Song is Love Unknown by Samuel Crossman; Oh, How He Loves You and Me by Kurt Kaiser).
And God inspires us to love one another with the love we have received from on High (see 1 John 4:7-8, 11-12; 1 Corinthians 13:1-8).
However, it is important to note that behaviors and attitudes can get in the way of looking deeply into the eyes of God, the eyes of the Gospel, and seeing God’s never-ending, never-failing, always-forgiving love.
Among those things that can get in the way are these:
- Believing we don’t deserve God’s love because of an ongoing feeling of inadequacy or shame.
- An unrepented pattern of sinning blocks a person’s ability to experience God’s love, thus resulting in not receiving a more complete and satisfying life in Christ.
- Self-aggrandizement and thinking too highly of oneself. Not seeing any real need to turn away from anything, and thus no heartfelt need to seek or receive forgiveness.
What does God think of those behaviors and attitudes that get in the way of growing in our comprehension of His love? First, God sees us for who we are. If anyone is in Christ [within his embrace], that person is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Secondly, our Lord wants us to think on, reflect about, repeatedly and frequently pay attention to the fact that whatever our age, we are new in Christ. At our core, we are NOT our lesser selves. God wants us to see ourselves as He sees us: His saved by grace, adopted and forgiven children. I have loved you with an everlasting love. (see Jeremiah 31:3; John 3:16-17; Romans 8:1; Ephesians 4:22-24; Hebrews 4:15-16; 12:5-6).
By God’s strength and courage, we will leave behind the ways of our old self and more fully take hold of God’s love, clearly revealed in our Lord’s death on the cross. There is no greater love! | 
