A Love Too Wide to Circle and Too Deep to Finish Learning

The love of Christ is too large to finish understanding, and Scripture treats that as an invitation to worship, not a problem to solve. It is Sunday morning, the house is quiet, your coffee is cooling, and one sentence from Ephesians is open in front of you. You can read it a dozen times and still not reach the edges of what it describes.

C.H.E.W. with Me

New here? What is CHEW? — a 30-second practice that grows into a day woven with God’s love.

C – Clarity: I Can Explain His Love, but I Can’t Get My Arms Around It

Stand on a beach at low tide and you can name the ocean, point to where it begins, and tell a child how salt water works. You still cannot hold it. Many believers relate to God’s love that way: the doctrine is clear, the vocabulary is ready, and the love itself keeps slipping past every attempt to take its full measure. Paul knew that experience and did not apologize for it. He prayed straight into it.

H – Hear: Paul Prays You Would Know What Cannot Be Fully Known

“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.” (Ephesians 3:17-19)

Paul is writing from prison, and he opens this prayer on his knees before the Father (3:14). He asks that believers be rooted, like a tree, and grounded, like a foundation, in love. Both images describe something that holds a person up, not something a person must hold up.

The key words work together. “Comprehend” katalambano means to seize or take hold of. “Know” ginosko means to know by experience. Then Paul says the love of Christ “surpasses” knowledge, from hyperballo, to throw beyond. He asks believers to know by experience what they cannot seize by analysis. God’s love in Christ is the one subject meant to enlarge the student rather than be mastered by one.

Paul lists four dimensions and never says what they measure. He does not need to, because the only thing in the sentence big enough to fit is the love he names next. The love of Christ is too wide to circle and too deep to touch bottom, and it already holds a believer who has not finished understanding it.

E – Exchange: Trade “Understand It First” for “Held Already”

Many believers quietly hold a rule: understand God’s love well enough, then rest in it. Paul reverses the order. The Greek verb for “comprehend” returns where he says Christ Jesus “has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12), and there Christ is the one doing the grasping. God’s love does not wait for a thorough grasp. It has already taken hold. Exchange the rule of understanding first for awe at being held already, and treat the unfinished parts of your understanding as reasons to worship rather than reasons to worry.

Because God’s love can be known but never fully comprehended, how does that change my feelings about everything in God I cannot yet explain?

W – Walk: Say the Four Dimensions Out Loud

Take five minutes, standing if you can. Read Ephesians 3:17-19 aloud once. Then pause after each word (breadth, length, height, depth) and speak one sentence of praise that begins “Your love is…”, borrowing from Scripture where you need to. For example, Psalm 103:11 says His steadfast love is as high as the heavens are above the earth. Say all four out loud. Praise spoken aloud lands differently than praise merely considered.

Closing question: What changes if the love of Christ holds you before you finish understanding it?