O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus ~ blog

Samuel Trevor Francis found himself standing on a bridge over the river Thames contemplating suicide.  He was only a teenager but in the throes of despair.  We do not know any more of the details except he chose not to and went on to write the hymn O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus in 1875. Here is the first stanza;

 O the deep, deep love of Jesus,
Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
Rolling as a mighty ocean
In its fullness over me!
Underneath me, all around me,
Is the current of Thy love
Leading onward, leading homeward
To Thy glorious rest above!

One of the things the father of lies tries to convince us of is that God has stopped loving us.  It makes sense because after all, He has done for us and in spite of our good intentions we keep returning to sexual sin.  Why do we continue to do this?  Why are our prayers not being answered?  Surely, God has abandoned me because I am such a worthless piece of s#*t.

Now that reasoning makes perfect sense if God were a flawed human being like us.  If He believed our promises to stop and only had our word to believe in.  Surely, He would reach a point of “one more time” and if we fall again, we are finished.  That we should know better and if we really loved Him, we would stop.

However, that is not the God of the Scriptures who does not treat us as our sins deserve.  He is the God of Grace and Mercy.  He is the God who knows all things and has always known all things.  He has known every sin we would ever commit or have even thought of committing before the creation of the universe.

And knowing every single thought we would have, every word we would speak, and action we would take chose to love us anyway and adopt us as His children.  When we as humans adopt a child, it is with hopes and dreams about what this child will become, and we hope by our love and goodness to the child he or she will turn out to be a good person.  And if that child for whatever reason turns out to be a horrible person we are filled with pain and sorrow.

However, that is impossible with God.  He chose us and adopted us knowing full well every sinful action we would ever think or make.  Knowing full well all the sins of all of our life He has made us His children not so stand by and watch to see if we can make it.  But so that He could place His Spirit inside of us with the hope that we will allow Him to change us and transform us into more Christ-like believers.

Paul tries to capture this thought in his prayer for the Ephesians in Ephesians 3:14-19;

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,  from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,  that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and 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.”

My friends … that is a passage well worth memorizing!!!  We all need to be strengthened with power by the Holy Spirit in our inner being.  We need to comprehend the breadth, length, height, and depth of God’s love for us.  And as we do this and learn more of the deep, deep love of Jesus we can be filled up to all the fullness of God.

Read that again … “filled up to all the fullness of God!”

What could be better than that???  We have felt the emptiness created by our addiction to sexual sin.  We have gone to that cesspool over and over again looking for love and intimacy from something that always takes more than it gives and leaves us with a continuing lust for more.

We become addicted to false intimacy because it is so quick and easy to have.  But how many donuts must one man eat before he realizes one more will never be enough? Our sin grows deeper and larger and containing it becomes more and more difficult.

All the while there is something that will fill that Grand Canyon in our soul.  It is the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus.  His love for you is infinite.  It is never ceasing out of surprise that you have sinned again.  His love always goes deeper than our deepest sin.

So, will you join me in praying for yourself that the Spirit would strengthen you in your inner man?  So that we might begin to better comprehend this never-ending love of God and realize that He did not save us in hopes that we would become better men.  No, He saved us from sin so that He might save us from ourselves and transform us into men and women more like His Son Jesus.

Fill ‘er up, Lord.  Fill us up with the Spirit and enable us to walk in purity today.

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