Ephesians 3.18 records God’s desire for us to have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.

Our fundamental need and problem is the lack of love we feel from God, others and ourselves. The Bible is actually a love story.

It is God’s story of love that caused Him to create. It is God’s story of love to try and recapture that which He made like Himself, with the ability to do as it will, after rebelling against Him Who gave us life and can alone sustain our lives both now and forevermore.

It is God’s story of love demonstrated by personal sacrifice on behalf of all humanity for all time. It is God’s story of love promising an eternity with Him and all those who love Him that will never see tears, suffering or shame.

The Bible is a love story; God’s love for humanity revealed through His engagement with humanity over our first 5000 or so years. Within the story is the explanation for our poverty of feeling love and experiencing love. It describes us as having a brokenness only God can heal and only then to be fully experienced when we leave this world to permanently enter His world.

In the meantime, God promises to fill us with Himself by way of His Spirit to comfort us in our suffering and to encourage us in our living for Him expressed by living sacrificially toward others. His promise is that as we give our lives away we find them, particularly when we give them away for His purposes.

This explains why the happiest people are the most generous people. They experience the reality of this truth. The most needy among us express our poverty through stealing, violence and oppression demanding love from things and others in such a way that it harms the one or the thing from which we seek to be loved.

Of course, things can never love people. We pursue things in order to express love for ourselves but this expression of love never lasts. Real love is experienced by giving not by taking, buying or demanding. We can feel love if we will receive it freely, if we can let another love us for who we are, but that is hard.

This is why the most popular love is a mother’s love. It is the best known type of unconditional love most of us have experienced, most of us but not all of us. Yet mom too has failed us and neither can even her love reach the great depth of our soul.

Only God can plunge that deep with His infinite love. He wants us to know that love. His love that is immeasurable, immovable and immutable.

His love for us expands heaven and earth bridged by the outstretched arms of His Son longing to be poured into our hearts by His Spirit.

He stands at the door of our soul and knocks, open wide if you will receive the love of God.