Do You Really Know How Loved You Are? | Ephesians 3:14–21

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning, friends. You may be seated. Uh if you’re visiting, my name is Alex. I get the privilege of being one of the pastors here at South. Would love to get a chance to say hello to you afterwards. Please come say hi. We’d love to share a little bit about uh the heartbeat of this community, why we do what we do. Uh today, I’d like to start us with with a guess uh wi with a question. Have you ever sent a message to someone, maybe a text message, maybe an email, and then gone back and reread the message and said, “I’m not sure that message means what I thought it meant, or I don’t think I meant I said what I meant to say in that communication.” What surprises me with this is it is it can happen so easily.

Just recently, I’ve developed what I’d call, I guess, a typo. Whenever I text anyone, I tend to text in a rush. I tend to be moving around. I send a lot of messages every day. And so in the middle of that, I’ve noticed that our type type hit send and then look back. And something in the message has shifted. Somewhere out of nowhere, I’ve developed a habit of replacing exclamation marks with question marks. Now, that seems on the surface like a really small shift, but think about how that conveys a very different message to the one you intended to convey.

Maybe I text my wife saying, “Hey, I love you. I love you. I don’t know. It’s been 17 years. I guess I’m figuring that out. It’s like it’s a bit early to commit. It’s what it sounds like, right? I love you. Question mark. Or how about this one to a staff member? That’s a brilliant idea. Maybe I’m not sure. Or or one I just sent just the other day. I was up in the mountains and was coming back for Sunday morning services. I wasn’t preaching. I was just coming back to attend. And so I text Hannah, our worship leader, that day just to connect.

And and what I said is this. I will be there on Sunday. Very excited that you’re leading. I don’t know. And then there’s this mad rush to try and change the message to edit it before they read it. And she texts back before I could reply. I saw the question mark just so you know. It just it just happens so easily. You might say like this. A small change can alter the meaning. Man, that joke didn’t work in the first service either. It just be mean. It must be me, not you guys. This is true when it comes to language as well.

Where you land the particular weight on a sentence changes how we receive that sentence. A little emphasis here. Little shift there changes the meaning of a sentence. I’m going to play you a video in just a moment from some of the best Shakespearean actors in the world. These actors got together to show exactly this fact with one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines. Hamlet’s third saliloquy. If you don’t know what a saliloquy is, means it’s the third time Hamlet stood on stage talking to himself. Getting a little lost in his moment. To be or not to be, that is the question.

And so here they go playing with this sentence. To be or not to be that is question sorry I mean yes I’m yes but if you don’t mind it no or or to be or not to be. Try this. To be or not to be that is the question. Don’t lose focus. To be or not to be. That is the question. To be or not to be. That is the question. To be or not to be, that is the question. To be or not to be. that is the question. And so every single one has a different take. on where the emphasis lies.

And the sentence changes just a little bit depending on where that emphasis is. You might say this, our attention lands wherever we place the weight in a sentence. Now this is true just in literature, but it’s also true spiritually. When we read scripture, we read a particular part and where we place the weight, that’s where it lands in us, where we feel that deep connection. Today, we’re going to build a sentence from the passage that we just heard. We’re going to land in this one sentence that I hope gives you this broad sense of what God is saying.

But while every single word in the sentence is vital, there’s one particular word in that sentence that for me was lifechanging in terms of how I understood how God saw me, how God felt about me today. Uh I would like us to end with one sentence. The passage you just heard, Ephesians chapter 3, verse 14 to 21, is what I’d call it the emotional center of the whole of the letter. Paul, this guy in prison in the first century around 61 AD, writing to churches that he’s known, maybe helped start, people he deeply cares about, and gives them quite often these two halves of a letter.

He gives them the first part that’s technically called the the indicative part like because God has done all this part and then he gives them this imperative part. So because of the first part you guys should do dot dot dot dot. Up until this point Paul has not given them a single rule to follow, not given them a single life instruction. Everything he’s done has been centered around what God has done over and over again. God has done this. God has done this. And now he gets to this final moment of this first half and he’s going to pray for them and by extension going to pray for people like you and me sitting in churches all over the world and then he’s going to conclude it by doing what’s called a doxology giving glory to God for what he has done.

And so this is where he begins begins in verse 14. for this reason. Now, those of you that were here a week ago, who have particularly good memories to be able to remember a sermon from a week ago, will know that’s exactly where we started in the last passage. He starts with for this reason. So, one of the reasons that writers on this letter think that Paul Paul has this capacity to just throw in an aside, an adjacent, a a tangent moment where he seems to be talking about something completely disconnected. But because Paul is brilliant, the disconnection, the the the adjacent, the the tangent is actually a brilliant point.

And unlike Paul, unlike many of us, Paul has the capacity to not only make a tangent, but to come back to where he was going without any break in the conversation at all. I make tangents all the time, both in sermons and in life. I can sit in my office doing one thing and then next minute I start doing something else and I can never for the life of me remember what I was doing before I was doing the thing I was now doing. Not so with Paul. can make this tangent and then come back to precisely the point.

So in verse one you begin for this reason and in verse 14 you begin again for this reason. He picks up where he left off and his tangent was to emphasize this one particular point. The God at one point was the God of one particular group of people and now is open welcoming to be the God of every single person that has ever lived. that at one point God was the compassionate God, the gracious God, the slow to anger God, the God of loving faithfulness to one family group, one clan. And now that loving faithfulness, that slow to anger, that compassion, that grace is is now for every person in history.

And so now Paul, having said all that, goes back to where he was going. Feels like a conclusion. You know, a good sermon should always have this moment where you feel like it’s coming to an end and then the pastor keeps going for another 20, 30, 40 minutes. Some kind of long extra should, right? That’s what you want. Like an extra whole bunch of stuff. Paul has this way of giving us the ending that was supposed to be there in the first place. For this reason, I kneel before the father. Paul says, ‘I pray. Pray to this God that I’ve been describing to you.

Pray by kneeling before him. Maybe you’re someone who might say, I pray, but I’m not sure that your physical position matters much at all. [snorts] And I would agree with you to a point. There’s no rules about how you should pray, the physical posture you should take. But many of you who have prayed while lying on your bed with your head on your pillow know that after a while [snorts] seems like you lose consciousness, drift off into a beautiful sleep and the prayer is over. If you tried to pray while using an iPhone, you’ve noticed that you quickly get distracted. inevitably because the type of people we are though we’re human physical the posture we take when we pray actually does inevitably change how we go about praying this is Eugene Peterson and his commentary on Ephesians the physical act of bowing my knees before the father is an act of reverence on my knees I’m no longer in a position to flex my muscles strut or cower hide in the shadows or show off on stage I become less so that I be can become aware of more.

And yes, I am aware. I’m talking about showing off on stage from a stage. I’m aware of the irony. For this reason, I kneel before the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. Paul says that somewhere by extension, every single one of us is part of God’s lineage, go part of God’s family. that story descends out. It’s a family tree that comes from two people across all of history and that you by extension, whether you’ve decided to follow Jesus or not, a part of people that claim their lineage back all the way to God’s original creation.

You have this imar day, this image of God deep inside of you. I think if Paul were to say this to a group of people living in our age at our particular time, maybe he’d phrase it something like this. We are born with a cosmic homesickness. That somewhere because of that lineage, because of that past, because of that connection, somewhere in each of us, there is a deep need to be loved by the God who made everything, who made us. Whether we know it or not, there’s something missing. We try to fulfill that in all sorts of places, but sometimes there is a sense or always perhaps there is a sense of loss, a sense of missing something.

Homesickness is something that I’ve talked about feeling at different points on a physical level. My wife and I watch The Great British Baking Show. Any fans of The Great British Baking Show out there? I love it. If you’re not watching it, you’re missing out. You need to jump on board. My wife watches it for the baking. I watch it for the beautiful British countryside that reminds me exactly what I’m missing at home. There’s a sense of homesickness for many of us who have moved different places at different times. But this is bigger than that. It’s not about a particular space.

It’s an inbuilt thing. A thing that reminds us we are deeply designed to be connected to the God of the universe. Kurt Thompson the writer philosopher says this. And we come out of the womb looking for love. I phrased it like this. We are born into the world looking for love. And we look for that love. Maybe through a marriage, assuming that will give us everything we ever needed. Or maybe through having children and assuming that will give us everything we ever needed. Or maybe through the right profession and assume it will give us everything we ever needed.

We look for all sorts of ways to enter into relationships that will remind us we have everything that we need and that we are valuable and then after a while find that they can never give us the thing that was missing. They’re good things. It’s a blessing to be in a good marriage. It’s a blessing to have have children to to have grandchildren to have all the sort of things that we feel promised in life. But it seems that the common story is this that over time. It feels like there’s there’s something still missing, still not quite there.

And then of course it seems that we go looking for that in all sorts of other places as well. This is the writer Alan Noble, pastor. Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression. So that at times modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are which is a fairly accurate description of social media. There is a desperate need to be seen to be told we are valuable. At times we find that in qualities that we have abilities that we have.

David Foster Wallace in his graduation speech at Kenyon College said this. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There’s no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. seems that if we throw our whole life into anything, it can end up missing something. And so I would change my first point and say it’s actually not that we were born looking for love.

Somewhere the core that Paul is getting at is this that we were born into the world looking for God. St. Augustine 4th century, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you. that somewhere we’re created with that cosmic homesickness that tells us something might be missing. And until we find it, there is no rest. Unfortunately, in Paul’s language, equally, we are born into a world where God is looking for us. That God is the one who is the father of all people by lineage and longs to be the father of all people personally in a relationship with them.

And then he continues verse 16. I pray that out of his glorious riches, Paul is aware that God is the God who has more than enough of everything. He’s the God that is complete in himself. And and Paul says, I pray out of his glorious riches, the the the the completeness he has in himself. I pray that he might give you what? He might strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being. Maybe you translate it this way. He says something like this. May the God who has more than enough give you more than enough.

Think about what we read last week. Paul is in prison writing to this group of people. He says, “I’m in prison for your sake and somewhere this is all going to work out for God’s glory and for you to experience him in new ways.” There’s a hidden element to that, right? If Paul’s in prison, by extension, it might mean that the people who are listening to him or reading him might one day end up in prison. And by extension, the people that are experiencing the work of Jesus 2,000 years later might end up in prison.

That somewhere in Paul’s understanding is not that a life following Jesus will give you everything you hoped you had. Will give you a dream life where everything seems to fall into place. that actually if Paul is right and God is doing something new in the world that when you live into that thing into that story sometimes it might actually make your life harder more complex. I could tell you story after story of business people that I’ve spoken to who have said it it has cost me to follow Jesus. It’s cost me promotions. It’s cost me income.

It’s cost me sales. that there’s a way of living out the way of Jesus that can cost you on purely earthly financial terms and also potentially if Paul is right in the spiritual world as well. Somewhere Paul says there’s a chance that you might come under all sorts of things under all sorts of persecution following in the way of Jesus and and what he prays for is that God might give you from his riches enough to sustain you to keep you going. May the God who has more than enough give you more than enough to keep you going, to keep you following him.

And then we move to verse 17. And and I want you to watch for something here cuz because Paul here is really difficult to teach. He runs on sentences. They run through verses. It seems like everything follows onto everything else. So So you’re going to have to pay attention. So that Christ may what? May dwell in your hearts through faith. Why did he say that? I mean, they’re all following Jesus, right? Sounds like maybe the prayer you were taught to pray as a teenager. May some maybe some Sunday school teacher came alongside you when you were young and said, “If you want to follow Jesus, pray Jesus, please come live in my heart.” Or something like that.

Or or that kind of language. Not particularly something the the scriptures say, but still like a good way of expressing what we need from God. But he’s talking to people that have been following Jesus for years. Why would he say come and may he dwell in your hearts through faith? The word there for dwell is katier ko. It’s dwell. Yes, but more than a visit. It’s not just come and just be there for a while, stay a couple of days. It’s not just like maybe visit on and off. The language there, the the dream is stay for a long time.

Come, yes, but stay with me. Don’t go. Don’t disappear on me. Think about some of the invites Jesus made on earth. Mark 6:31, come away with me. Let us go alone to a quiet place and rest for a while. Matthew 11:28 from the message version. Thing we’ve been using as our response to the readings. Are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me. You’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it. Learn what?

The unforced rhythms of grace. The invitation of Jesus on earth is to come. Come to me. Find a welcome. Find an open door. Come to me. But don’t just come. Stay with me. Belong. Dwell here for a while. Couple of weeks ago, I built a door on stage for you. I wanted you to feel the moment where Paul describes this this thing that Jesus does where he opens up a door. He knocks down a wall and there’s an invite in. And that’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, “Come to me. Then you step through that door.” And sure, there’s that moment of first experience, but that’s not the end, right?

So now for a moment, I want you to imagine you step in through the door. You walk into a space. It’s a table set. This table sits the three in one guard, the father, son, holy spirit. To live in constant relationship to themselves. It’s not a mathematical problem or equation to solve. It’s not something you have to figure out with your mind. It’s just the way that God is described. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, per perfect relationship with themselves. So you walk in and there’s a table, three people, four chairs. You walk into a room where all the other persons in the room are united at one, a far more like each other than they’ll ever be like you.

You are the odd one out. Different, human, flawed, perhaps even broken. What is the invite there? The invite is to come, yes, but it’s to stay. It’s to sit, to know that you’re perfectly welcome. Maybe you’ve walked before into an environment where you’ve known instantly you completely belong, are completely accepted exactly as you are. Sure, there might be things to change in the future, but right now the message is just pull up a chair, sit at a table, you’re welcome in. That’s the kind of dwell that Paul is talking about. that somewhere you and I might have a relationship with God that is ongoing where we dwell with him and he dwells with us where he is mine and I am his and that somewhere we don’t have to leave.

Maybe you’ve been in a place where like I could pause right here right now for a long long time. That’s the kind of space that Paul is talking about. Come to me, yes, but dwell with me. Stay with me. You belong here. More different than God, but welcome to stay here. That’s the kind of dwell that he’s talking about. May there be this ongoing relationship that is that is permanent, connected. The writer Andrew Murray says this, “No wondering one. As it was Jesus who drew you when he said come, so it is Jesus who keeps you when he says abide.

The grace to come, the grace to abide are alike from him alone.” In modern language, you might just simply say, “Come to me, stay with me.” Jesus invite is to come to him and stay with him. And because Paul’s continuing with this one big idea, he continues straight from there. And I pray that you be what? Rooted and established in in love. That there’s two ideas there. One’s really organic and one’s much more industrial. On one hand, he says, “May may the roots of your life go down into the love of God. May the thing that can sustain you be the thing that sustains you.” And on the other hand, it’s a building metaphor.

It’s like build your life practically on this kind of love. Having found your roots, your [snorts] organic nature in Jesus love, having built your foundation, your practical life on Jesus love. Having started in love and now become complete in love. And he runs on in verse 18, may have power together with all the Lord’s holy people, everyone together. It was a community thing. May all of you people, here it is. This is the verse we’re getting to to grasp how wide, how long, how high and deep is the love of Christ. This verse that to me is a heart verse of all of scripture that somewhere the dream of God, the heart of God is that we might know just how much he loves us.

And you read these terms, you read this idea, and suddenly you have this moment. Is this just Paul caught on a wave of his own rhetoric? He’s talking in this greater and greater language. It gets grander and grander and suddenly has this moment where he finishes with this flourish of like the height, the width, the depth, the the breadth of God’s love. But as you look back across scripture, there’s all these places where it suggests that the cosmos, the the universe outside us might be the best place to go to learn about who God is.

Job 11 7-9, a book about a man who is suffering greatly, who has three friends that gather around him and talk mostly nonsense for every time they’re invited to speak. And yet this is one of the things that one of them says that actually seems right. Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above. What can you do? They are deeper than the depths below. What can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea. Psalm 139 verse 17:18.

How precious to me are your thoughts, God. How vast is the sum of them. Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. To some writers over the years, it’s been like the whole universe shouts about God’s grandeur, about how big he is, how much his love is for each of us. David, the psalmist writes, “Look at the grains of sand. God’s thoughts about you are more than any of those. They can’t be counted. It’s beyond you.” And so somewhere Paul begins to nudge us to ask this kind of question.

I pray that you would understand the height of God’s love, the depth of God’s love, the width of God’s love, the breadth of God’s love. In his terms, in his language, it’s like he draws a 3D picture with you in the middle of it and around you just expanse after expanse and says that is really what I’m talking about when I’m talking about the love of God. Think about the the the greatness of the universe in which we dwell. This is the pillars of creation about 7,000 light years away. And they themselves are about five light years in width.

Means that light to get from one side to the other side takes about five years to get there. There is a vastness out there. And then lurking behind that vastness, the idea that the God who created it must be greater still somewhere that idea is where Paul is trying to get us to. The idea that examine for a moment the vastness of God’s love. Couple of different translations that usually unpack some of these ideas of verse 18. You’ll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth.

Test its length. Plum the depths. Rise to the heights. Notice what happens here in the letter. Paul’s got through three chapters now nearly. And he’s talked constantly about God’s grace for people, his love for people, his longing for people. He’s welcome to every single person ever. He hasn’t yet got to anything to do. He’ll get there. Following Jesus inevitably means change. But notice for a second the order. God’s love brings transformation. Transformation doesn’t bring God’s love. That the invite is to come and experience this love and be transformed because of it. see this in the life of Jesus in his invite to people to a young man who comes to him and says I want to follow you and and Mark’s comment on the text is simply this Jesus looked at him and loved him there’s an ask Jesus will make there’s something for him to do but his love comes first Paul says I long for you as followers of Jesus to know how high his love is how deep his love is how wide his love is how the breadth of his love.

And then in a second he says something that seems to go completely against all that. Watch this for a second. It leaves us with this question so far. I think the question might be this. How can you measure the love of the one who can’t be measured? And Paul seems to completely agree. He says something like this. Not quite verbatim, but something like this. Even though you’ll never quite be able to measure that love. Which brings us to the sentence that I think defines this passage. For me, every word is important, but there’s one word that for me was deeply transformative, that began to do a work in me that took a lot of years, but ultimately was exactly what I needed to learn.

And the sentence is this. God loves you more than you can know. Paul says, “I want you to know the width, the height, the breadth, the depth.” And then says, “It’s all a little bit beyond you. It’s beyond what you can know. Beyond what you can intellectually process.” And so, think about that sentence with me for a moment. Maybe the word that stands out is God. It should. We heard last week he described himself as compassionate God, gracious, slow to anger, bounding in love and faithfulness. God is always the subject of every sentence, never the object.

He’s always the beginning. But I think you probably know that piece. Maybe it’s loves the particular type of love that God is able to love with. What’s described in scriptures as agrope love, the love in which someone can give of themselves for you without needing anything in return. The love that lays down its life for a friend. But I think you already knew that as well. Maybe it’s you. The fact that in the midst of this, it’s all personalized. There’s this idea that God loves everyone who’s ever lived, but he but he also loves you exactly as you are with all of your flaws and all of your brokenness.

He He loves you. He wants to transform you. But but he he loves you. Or maybe it’s more that whatever you figured out, it’s more again. It’s it’s beyond that number. Whatever you calculated, he loves you more than that. But that wasn’t the word that was life-changing for me. was no. It was no. Some years ago growing up, I was in a church about 20 21 years old. Church had a lot of young adults in it. And even amongst that large group, I’d gotten this reputation for being intellectual, for thinking a lot, for reading a lot, for on the surface knowing a lot.

But internally, I was deeply broken, struggling, desperate to try and understand how God felt about me, trying to calculate it, measure it, figure it out, so somewhere I could start living like God, like God actually loved me. was invited to join this small group with one of the pastors, younger guy, maybe late 20s, charismatic, prophetic in terms of like he could tell you almost what God thought or was saying. And we were praying together one day and in the midst of that time of prayer, I can still remember to this day exactly where I was sat, what I was doing.

And in the middle of that time, his pastor said, “Alex, I feel like God wants you to know that he loves you more than you can know. You see, I was constantly thinking. Wheels were constantly turning. It’s like, I’m going to figure it out one day. Going to get the measurements sorted. I’m going to figure out like what is the width? What is the length? What is the breadth? What is the height? Where is the level to which God’s love might stop for me? Didn’t particularly want to do anything that might cause it to stop, but I had so many questions about how the God of the universe saw me.

And so, the intellectual wheels kept spinning as I tried to turn it into this math equation that had a solution at the end of it. And in the midst of this, guy just said, “God loves you more than you can know.” So maybe this isn’t an intellectual puzzle to be solved. Maybe it’s something else. Ephesians 3:19. And to know this love, this width, this height, this breadth, this depth, that what? And to know this love that surpasses knowledge. It’s beyond anything that you can know. May you experience the love of Christ though it’s too great to fully understand fully.

And then my favorite version, even though it’s so great, you’ll never understand it. I think we go into it sometimes. We’re an intellectual church. I like that. We like to study. We like to nerd out. We like to get into things like that. And yet it seems like God’s heart is that there’s a limit to that. that if you’re someone that relies on intellect for some things it quite he can’t quite get you the answer to the cloud of unknowing mystic book with no known author says this God may well be loved but not thought by love God can be caught and held but by thinking never and that’s why for me the life-changing word in that sentence was no that God loves you more than you can know.

And so that leaves me with another question which might look like this. Maybe the question you’re asking. Why is thinking not enough? If you’re someone who’s really good at thinking, why can thinking not get you there? Why can you not just ponder it more? Like think, think, think? Why can you not run those processes that God has given you and get to this idea that God loves you in a way that he wants you to get to it? And I think I have an answer for you because I think I have the answer for myself too.

You see, if it comes to thinking about it and figuring out in that way, then I always have a trump card to lay, trump card to play, one that can always give me the answer as to why God shouldn’t actually love me as much as he might. And it’s me. I spend a lot of time with me. I know what I’m like. I know how much I think. I know the things I think about. I know how broken I feel. I know how irritating I am to myself. How at times how irritating I am to those close to me.

I know all of the list of reasons why I don’t add up to what I think I should be after this many years of following Jesus, this many years of being married, this many years of parenting. I know all of those reasons. And so whenever it becomes a math equation, whenever it becomes about knowledge, I always have this one card that says God shouldn’t love me anymore, that he shouldn’t even like me, and it’s me. And they play that card, an argument feels like it’s over. There’s always a card to play when you’re thinking, always a reason to give that God doesn’t really love you at all.

Paul seems to say that God’s love is not something that you know. It’s something that you actually get to experience it somewhere. It’s supposed to drop from here in your head to somewhere in your heart. And I know you intellectual people in the room. For a moment you’re like, well, it doesn’t really sit in your heart, does it? That’s just an organ that pumps blood blood around your body. But but but metaphorically, there is this place inside you. There’s not just an intellectual thing. It’s an experienced thing. Why does Paul think this experience of God’s love is so important?

Why does he want you to more than just think it? Why does he want you to know it experientially? It’s here in verse 19. That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. that something happens when we experience God’s love, not just intellectually know about it, that starts to push us towards transformation that makes all sorts of things possible that weren’t possible before. This is a picture of Jackie Pollinger. Jackie Pollinger was 17 years old when she went out to the walled city out in Hong Kong. She got on a boat at 17 with £10 in her pocket with an obo, which isn’t much help in the world city.

She was someone who based on the love of God was able to do extraordinary things. That’s the kind of thing experiencing God’s love can do. And it just doesn’t just apply to people like Jackie. It applies to anybody who walks in and sees a sign on the wall that says, “Living in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.” That somewhere experiencing God’s love is exactly the thing that enables us to do that. We get to live in the world like Jesus. Because we have experienced his love. Why can we live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus?

Because we’re people deeply loved by our father. I was going to end there and then on Monday I went to an event uh with a guy called Richard Foster, one of the early fathers of like bringing spiritual disciplines back to the church. and he did a spiritual practice that we’ve done before at South, but it’s been a long time. And when we did it, I thought, this is exactly how we’re supposed to end this service. So, would you stand with me? This practice is called palms down, palms up. It’s this invite to let go of all the things that are holding you back from experiencing God’s love.

Maybe to let go of the intellect that has told you you can figure it out, that you’re smart enough, you can get to the answer. And so what we do is this. You take your hands, put them out in front of you. turn your palms down. And in this moment, take all of the intellect that you rely on, all of the ways that you’re sure you can figure it out, all of the mathematical equations, the negotiations. Palms down. Let go. Take all of the reasons God shouldn’t love you. Not if he’s got any sense anyway.

All of the things that you’ve done, maybe even a doing, palms down. All the brokenness, all the hurt, all the things that have been done to you, all the ways people have hurt you that tell you really you were never lovable to begin with. Arms down. Take all of the past experiences of trying to allow God to love you. All the times it hasn’t worked before. All of the ways you know you can’t change. Palms down. All of the old story that says this is just my story. I’ll be like this forever. Palms down. Take all the lack of relationships.

Maybe you’d say no one’s ever felt like they’ve chosen you. And that’s the reason that God doesn’t either. And to that we say palms down. and let go of those things. And whenever you’re ready, might be now, later today, tomorrow, next week. Turn up our hands and we say, “Palms up. And we receive God’s love. The love of the one who built everything that we see, set the foundations of the earth, stretched out the sky, loves you, longs for you in a way you’ve never longed for him. who went to immeasurable lengths so that you could have a relationship with him, palms up.

Who longs for you not just to be able to think about his love, but to experience it? Maybe this is the moment. Palms up. God, for my friends, for myself, help us not to know about your love, to experience it, to be transformed by it. We raise our palms, asking that you would fill us with all of the fullness of your love. Ask that you would transform us because of that love. not convince ourselves we need to change to receive it. Thank you that you put in us a core, a longing for you and that you are looking for us too.

Palms up. We receive your love. Amen.