The Saturday Stoke #27
Listen to The Stoke
Welcome to this week’s Saturday Stoke, a short inspirational podcast designed to encourage and challenge you on the path ahead—it’s a place where, if I’m doing my job right, I’m spurring us all on toward love and good deeds.
It’s a podcast that looks like spring daffodils on the side of a mountain and smells like hamburgers on the grill roasted. If you're new to the Stoke, welcome! Feel free to poke around my blog The Edges Collective Dot Com.
If you find some inspiration, sign up for my newsletter called Further Up. You’ll get updates when the next episode of The Stoke drops and exclusive articles and community discussions. This week’s stoke looks at a topic that we all wish we had a bit more of: silence. Let’s get to it.
This week I want to remind you that God loves you.
And it’s not the kind of love we like to talk about in our culture. It’s a kind of love that is not only different, but cosmic.
Have you ever experienced an epiphany while reading a verse of Scripture you’ve read a thousand times, but for some reason, this time, your spirit was in a new and different place? And suddenly, bam. You’re weeping on your office floor.
It all started for me several weeks ago when I read through the book of Ephesians with my daughters. Days after finishing, I sat in my office one morning and read Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians again.
This time, I stopped at Paul’s famous and beautiful prayer near the end of chapter three. Just so we’re all on the same page, let me read it to you:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
<<to edit>>
As I began to pray this prayer for myself, and then to study it, a few observations stuck out to me; highlights that intensified the power of this incredible prayer that I too often simply rush through in my reading.
First, I observed that Paul’s prayer is a cosmic prayer for Christians. Paul’s use of Father is the Greek word patera. And though we like to think of God as our Abba, here, Father is used to mean Originator. Which makes sense because Paul says that all of the families of heaven and earth originate with God. Have you ever thought about what he means by “families in heaven”? I love thinking about that.
Then there’s Paul’s plea for these Christians to comprehend the four-dimensional love of God. And this love incomprehensible! He prays that the Holy Spirit will be able to give them the strength that no human can do on their own. This reminds God word telling Job to gather all of his faculties so that he could somehow comprehend the infinite power and glory of God.
The idea is that, through the spirit of God dwelling in them—literally dwelling in them!—that they might be able to comprehend an incomprehensible love. That being the love of God.
“But Tim,” you say, “We all know what love is. And that Christ died for us and all of that jazz. Aren’t you telling us something we already know?”
“Yes,” I reply, as I take a sip of tea. “But the idea is that we continue to pursue this love that I feel we sometimes take for granted. And we need strength to go further up and further in as it were, to search out this four-dimensional love of God.”
“What is this four-dimensional love you speak of, Tim?”
It’s like, when I say to my daughter Lyric, “I love you Lyric.” I mean something different than her reply, which is, “I love you, Daddy.”
Time works on us. We age, and our souls grow—and hopefully they grow closer to God. And in that growing, our love grows.
Lyric can’t know the true depth of my love! For she is only a child. And the depth of life has shaped me in ways that only time can achieve. I think about the moment when I saw her born, when the midwife raised her up and out of her mother’s womb. That was an experience that shaped my love. It opened up a new reservoir I didn’t even know existed.
Lyric doesn’t know what happened to my heart at that moment. And at that moment, neither did I. It was a time held in eternity. A colossal moment in which heaven itself seemed to fill up my heart. And here’s what Lyrics doesn’t know.
When I say I love you Lyric, what I’m really saying is, “I will die for you, Lyric.”
And when she responds, “I love you, daddy,” she’s saying something like, “I feel safe with you, Daddy.” And I know this is what she means. And that’s okay, and it is beautiful. But one day, her heart will open up even further, and it will grasp how wide and deep and high is my love for her.
This is what I think about when I think about God’s four-dimensional love. I think about something I cannot know right now without the Spirit of God strengthening my heart in ways I don’t understand.
When God says to me, “Tim, I love you.” What am I hearing?
When I say to God, “I love you, my Father,” what am I saying?
Perhaps I am saying, “I feel safe with you God.” Yes probably. “I am thankful for how you provide for me, God.” And this is all right and good.
But what is he saying when he says he loves me? I believe it is something I don’t quite know or understand. And I may never know this side of heaven. He speaks of a love that spans eternity. A love that existed before time, before the foundations of the cosmos were set. When he says, “I love you, Tim” he is speaking as one from whom love itself comes. He is the Fountainhead of love, the Originator of love. Love for Him is natural because it is the one of many excellencies of his character. It is a love that makes me lovely to him. It possesses the incomprehensible power to change me.
I thank God that I did not come up with this thing called love. Imagine if we humans thought it up, what it might look like now? And perhaps our culture reflects that very thing, in that it places love and lust in the same position. That it places love in a position of self-gratification. Love for our fallen world looks selfish, and grim, and idolized, and bent.
And so God is speaking not from the experiences of life, like me when I tell my daughter I love her. His experience comes outside of time, from the reaches of infinity itself. How can I fathom a love that holds all the mysteries of the world within it and then expresses itself to me? What does that mysterious look like here on earth? What would it do to and for others if I could somehow grasp it and reflect it back to my Originator?
When God says, “I love you, Tim,” he is saying, “I will die for you, Tim.” This is the pinprick of eternity I felt when Lyric was born, when all of my life converged on that one moment of wonder. And it is a reflection of this four-dimensional love from the Fountainhead of Love itself.
My daughters Lyric, Brielle and Zion will push their whole lives into my love. And my wife and I will hold them and say, “I love you.” And they will say it back to us. But it is not the same, and it is the same all at once. It is the same because it is the seed of eternity, the seed of a love that will grow into a dying love—an expanse they can’t understand right now.
And that, my friend, is you and me with God our Father Orginator. You, pushing into him. Getting enveloped in your love for him, pushing through to a love that can finally say to others, “I will die for you” as a reflection of this wondrous love that you’ve discovered as you fall endlessly into him.
And perhaps this willingness to die is the beginning of all that is.
This love I find to be the heart of beauty, the cosmic Lover of the universe. And it is the reason I long to push further up and further in, to let go of distractions, and throw myself off of the cliff of his love, and dive deep into the four-dimensions of God.
Stay stoked my friends.
