Agape 3 The Depth of God's Love

Okay, the title of my sermon is Agape, Part 3, about depth. I know we, for the last few weeks, have looked at Ephesians 3 and verse 18 that says it may hope that we comprehend the width, the length, the depth, and the height of God's love. But will we ever really understand, comprehend the depth of God's love? It is something that we will look at today. The state of Florida is full of sinkholes, in case you didn't know it. For those watching, they do not know that fact. Sometimes they pop up in the middle of the interstates. Sometimes they pop up right underneath a house all over. And some of them are pretty deep. How deep have you ever seen a sinkhole? 130 feet deep? That's pretty deep. We had a little one on our farm in Tennessee. It was only about 10 foot deep. 130 feet. You know the ocean at its deepest point is 35,000 feet deep. That is hard to imagine.

A deep, deep hole we can all look at. We've seen pictures. And in a way, it's scary, because you think, what if I fall in that hole? We had a cow one time that fell into our sinkhole and fell to 10 feet. Thankfully, she didn't break her legs. But what a job to pull that cow out from 10 feet deep. It was about three hours. Because the one thing about it, that 900 pound cow gave up. She didn't want out. And so we were not only pulling 900 pounds that didn't want to come out. We were beginning to wonder if we even wanted her out after about three hours. Well, she did get out. She got better after laying around for a couple of days. But it made me think of a deep, deep hole. And sometimes people can't even tell how deep it is. The depth of God's love. Can we comprehend? Comprehend actually means to discern. It also can mean to grasp. But the full extent of the word comprehend, when you truly do comprehend, you can use the word believe. Because that's what it's about. When you fully comprehend a matter, you begin to believe it. And so we are at the point where we must try to understand the depth of God's love for us. Oh, we may think we have it, but it's so much deeper than we've even began to comprehend. Discern, grasp, and to its fruition, really believe. There was a 1966 song by Petunia Clark. Does anybody remember Petunia Clark? Oh, that's a big part of you. I didn't see Matthew raise his hand. I didn't see Clive or Clive Junior raise his hand. As a matter of fact, she talked about the depth of God's depth of her love. We remember that. I remember it as a kid. I was seven years old when that song came out. They played it long after that. And it explained in her own words, and you kind of believed her words, that the love she was expressing was very, very deep. It was 11 years later, 1977, the year I graduated high school, that the Bee Gees decided to have a song entitled, How Deep is Your Love? Perhaps you remember that, Matthew? Clive? Okay, he does. But you get the point. People like a love that is deep.

But do we truly understand the deepest love of all is agape, God's love for us. You see, God's love is, was, will be so deep for his creation, even though it's not alive yet. His love is so deep he was willing to do anything for his creation. That's sometimes hard for us to believe. In mythology, or if I could better yet put it in my words, paganism, that has existed for 6,000 years, a replacement for God. People were required in some cases, and when you dealt with the God Molech, many cases, a life was to be sacrificed to show your love for this God, so he could show the back. Many of those times, as we picture Molech, there required a child to be sacrificed, and there are actually drawings of this big bronze metal God-like figure, but its hands were up like this, and you would actually place a child in those hands, and then it would raise and roll back into this oven and cook the child alive. Not just one, but many to the God of Molech. And the Bible sometimes it refers to as having your son pass through the fire. Sounds cold, cruel, but even at that time, because it was such an emotional time for the family, that the paganistic priest hired drums to be played all around this God, suppose God, so that it would drown out the cries of the babies. In some other pagan religions, they required the death of a virgin, a young girl, and they would actually be kept alive until their 14th, 15th, 16th birthday, at which time they were then thrown into the fire, actually killed in front of the people as they appeased their gods. As life was required to please their God. And now we come to the point where the exact opposite happened, where God actually came down and died for His creation. That's what Christ did. He was willing to die for His creation, unheard of. That's why it was so strange, even in the New Testament, when Paul would go and teach, because they'd never heard of such a... How could a God die? They had a hard time with it, because not only their religion doesn't teach that, it was so foreign to them that any superior being would sacrifice themselves for this little piece of dirt, skin and bones. Revelation 13 and verse 8. We see the Scripture. I'd like us to think about that today. We see the Scripture where it says that our Savior was slain from the foundations of the world. Hmm, how long is that guy? They estimate this planet is 14 billion plus years old. So, is the Scripture actually saying that our Savior, our God, the Word, actually carried the burden of having to die for us for 14 billion years? 14 billion plus years? Would that be right? Who would do that? Wait a minute. Man wasn't created for it. Over 14 billion years. How could someone, some being, actually love something that didn't even exist?

Yet. But I'd like you to think on that for a moment. Can parents love a child before he was born? Can a parent actually love a child that they can't actually see yet? Ask someone who has grieved from a miscarriage. Grieve for the unborn. It's been done, hasn't it?

I flashed back many years ago when I was 18 to a young girl who was 16, a friend of mine. He'd gotten pregnant. And she didn't want to tell her mother. And the boy that had gotten her pregnant was a big athlete. His dad had money in the town. So he had the answer. So we paid for her to go and have it taken care of, she said. It wasn't until later when she realized, really, what she had done. And it didn't take long. Remember her talking to me about it? Of course, that was outside of my realm of truly understanding. What do you know at 18? But she said, sometimes I wake up and I wonder what he would have looked like. She carried that with her. So, yes, God did love us before we existed. Before he knew us, as he even talked to Jeremiah, we see in Jeremiah, Before I formed you in the womb, I did what? I knew you. He knew and before he was even formed in the womb. How? How do you do that? How is that possible? How? How do you do that? How do you do that? How do you do that? God has loved us before he knew us or knew us because he loved us so much before we even existed. But we existed in God's mind. That's the mind of God that we can't comprehend. He sees the end from the beginning, says Scripture.

Isn't it amazing because God knows when he's going to send his son back to save this planet. And he even knows every single human being who will be born before, before, from that, from this day forward to the time Jesus Christ will return. He knows every one of them. He knows how many. He knows who they are. And if you believe the statistics between 40 and 50 billion people have ever lived that's lived during this time on earth. He knows every single one. He knows their DNA.

He knows everything about them. And he loved them so much that he was willing to send his son to die. It's amazing for us. Why did he love that deeply? He dreamed of a family. He truly wanted a family. And he was going to do whatever it took to have a family. That's how deep that love is, but not just a temporary one, but one that could last forever and ever and ever.

I'll even talk about that in my last message on agape. We talk about the height of God's love. But the depth of God's love, I see Christ trying to explain it. And he does a fabulous job because he explains in one parable. He explains how God can love a rebellious person like many of us and even an obnoxious person like many of us. So much that whatever it took, he was going to do it. If you will, I'd like you to go with me to the incredible story in Luke chapter 15.

If you've known it, I've given actual sermons. I've given three or four sermons. I could give quite a few sermons on it. But I'd just like to go through it with this story in mind about the depth of God's love, because Christ was trying to explain this to a world that was not ready. But we are, because they didn't see who He was. They didn't know the depth of His love nor the depth of the Father's love.

Christ even said, if you'd known me, you'd known the Father. He wanted to explain this to them because they didn't get it. All this time that has spent. So let's go there. Luke chapter 15 verse 11. Then He said, A certain man had two sons, and the father of them and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.

So He divided to them His livelihood, not the land, but the wealth, everything that could be sold. And so not many days after that, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with practical living. But when He had spent all, there arose a severe famine in the land, and He began to be in want. Then He went and joined Himself to a citizen of the country, and He sent Him into His fields to feed the swine.

And He would have gladly, He would gladly have filled His stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave Him anything. Hug-slop, we used to call it. He was willing to eat anything. Here was a rich man's son who decides, I want it all. I want it all. I'm gonna drink. I'm gonna eat.

I'm gonna have women. Until I can't have any more. You know what God's telling us? He's telling us that sometimes His way is the right way, but we go off. He's offered so much because He has so much, but we humans sometimes, we want to have some fun. And we get rebellious, don't we? And you know, sometimes it'd be easier for Him just to squash us like an ant, but He can't do it.

He cannot do it because of His love, the depth of His love. That's what the story's telling. It's a story about us. It covers part of humanity. Let's go down and see this now. Oh, but here's this incredible line in verse 17. But when He came to Himself, I think almost everybody sitting in this room today has had that epiphany. They've had that time where they came to themselves. I did. I did because I was young. I attended church, knew what it was all about, but then I had to go sew my oats.

My poor, ignorant father didn't know what he was talking about, that I couldn't go out and have fun and enjoy myself. I'd turn out to be miserable. He was quite a bit smarter than I was.

And when he came to himself, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have bred enough and to spare and I perish with hunger? He was going to die. If he lived anymore, he would just starve to death. I will arise and go to my father and will say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. What was he doing? He was practicing. He was practicing what he's going to say, because if it didn't work, he was a dead man. He had nowhere else to go.

And he thought his father might not accept him back. As a matter of fact, he'd been so rebellious and what did he do? Squander all the money. He probably grew up in this rich household and his father telling him how bad other people had it in the world. But he didn't see that. He had never been hungry before, but he was now. Never been away from his father before. But he was now, and he didn't know if his father would have him back. Remind you of time in your life where you wondered whether God would even listen to your prayers because you had turned away from him.

Verse 20, And he arose and came to his father. Obviously, if he was far enough country, he had a long way to walk. When the difference in the Middle East at the time was that, just like it was in Roman days, the slaves, which that's what he was, he became a slave. Someone else, they weren't allowed to wear shoes. That's how you knew they were slaves, not a free man. This would have pictured this time. So here, there's young man, skin and bones. Probably see his ribs, because in all likelihood, he ate the slop. He ate the pots, but he was still going to die. And nobody cared. All his friends from that riotous living where he would go out, I'm buying tonight.

All those parties, they forgot about him, used up his money. Now he was poor and dying, skinny, skin and bones. And when he arose, he came to his father. Can you imagine that? Having to walk all that way. But then, Christ reveals something that I don't know if it's revealed in any other place in the Bible. If it is, you can let me know, but I've looked. He reveals a part of God that none of us can really, truly understand, because it shows the depth of God's love. It says, but when his father, but when he was still a great way off, perhaps far-field as he was coming back to this great farm, his father saw him and had compassion, compassion on him. He knew his son. It's like you parents. You raise him from a local child. Even when they're far off, you know them. He saw him from afar off and he ran. Can you imagine that? He ran. God ran. God runs to us.

When we turn and come back, it says that God ran to us. Only place in the Bible that said, God ran. And that's what he's saying. He's explaining that God's love is so deep. He's not going to make us come all the way. He just says, come a little bit of the way and I will meet you with hands out to grab and hug. Can you imagine that reunion? Except here's the thing about God. We can all picture this in many of our lives.

God's still waiting for 40 billion people to do this too. He wants it all. He wants every child. That's why the Second Resurrection. That's why it's there. Because he wants their eyes to be opened and they'll be judged by his son and then he wants some run. He will run today. Amazing story. He had compassion and he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. This son who smelled like a pig. Sweat, dirt, filth, skin and bones. No shoes. Feet bleeding. He falls on his neck and kissed him. Didn't matter what he smelled like. My son has come home again. That's all he thought about. My daughter has come home again. 21. And the son said to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight and I'm not worthy. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. True repentance. We've all experienced that, haven't we? 22. And he said, But the father said to his servants, Bring out the best robe, put it on him. But he's stinking, smelling, ugly, filthy, haired down his back. 23. The best robe? Oh, yeah. He gets only the best. Is that incredible love? We'd be going, Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's take a shower first. Here, come over here. No, he had already been his father. You're back. You're back. 24. And then put a ring on his hand, a signet ring that gave him full authority to pay for things in the city. You were part of the family again, no matter what you did. 25. And put sandals on his feet. How long had it been since he had sandals on his feet? weeks, months. Could it have been a year?

What a picture. But Christ was telling us because he had to. He had to tell what his father was like and what that love is. And bring the fatted calf in 23 here and kill it and let us eat and be married. It was veal. Young fatted calf they kept only for holy days and special celebrations, weddings. This was more important than any of those. It's what the robe was kept for. Just for special day. This was the special day. When someone repents, always says about the joy in heaven. I think about that every time I baptize someone.

Joy in the presence of the angels. God's joy. For my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost. Now he's found. And they began to be married. Happy. Oh, man. There's going to be a party. Except not like your old parties you're used to. This is a party of family. You've come home again.

Now his older son was in the field and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. Wow. Let's go. Must be having a good time. So he called one of his servants and asked, what's going on? Did he go and check it out? Say, wow, okay. That must be something really good happening. No, he didn't. Just go. Go and find out what's going on. And he said to him, your brother has come. And because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.

But he was angry. Remember the obnoxious son? I've been that too. And many of you have been the same. Where God, I know what I'm doing. I don't need to tell you. I don't need to.

I'm fine. Been fine all the time. I didn't really need you to instruct me. I don't need any minister telling me how I should live. I don't need people telling me God's way. I learned it all when I was younger. I know it.

But he was angry and would not go in. Therefore, his father came out. He's having a little hissy fit, we called it. Temper tantrum. Sulled up. Probably had his lips stuck out. Look what he's given.

God didn't run this time, but he came out. As I read this story, I thought to myself, well, good, let him stay out there. He wants to act that way. He didn't want to celebrate with the brother and family. Good, let him go out in the field. Go on, get out. That's what I would have done, but I'm not God. And that is what Christ is teaching today, what God is about. Therefore, his father came out and did what? Pleaded with him.

So he answered and said to his father, Oh, these many years I have been serving you. I never transgressed your commandment at any time. Wow. We had another Christ on earth and didn't know it. And yet you never gave me a young goat that I may make merry with my friends. Have to ask the question, did he really have any friends, this guy? Probably not.

But as soon as this son of yours who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.

And the father said to him, Son, you have always been with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad for your brother was dead and is alive again, was lost, and is found. There's a lot of lost people out there. God wants them to find their way back to Him. Because deep down in all of us, in all human beings, there is an attachment. There's an attachment to God. A hole that can only be filled by God in each one of us. We just usually fill it with something else, don't we? And Christ knew that. Don't fill it with money. Don't fill it with women. Don't fill it with being self-righteous. Because He wants His sons. He wants His daughters. He wants them all. Imagine that. God's agape, a father's love, is one of the deepest things that can exist. Imagine spending eternity with someone. We can't. We never live forever. Some of you have lost makes that you spent decades. Last night, as I was doing the celebration service, I looked out at Jan Sirot. 62 years together. Her and Bob had spent. Loved each other dearly. Man, I used to talk about her. And they had all the pictures there. I had pictures of him when he was a child. But here when they first got married and everything. And she told me as I hugged her last night, I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I don't know how. She will. But he will forever be there. I bring that up because the father and the word have so much love and they spent so long together. And he had to give him up. Imagine how hard that is. Even if he knew, I know, a day's like a thousand years, thousand years like a day, so it's not that long. Really?

Imagine that. That you're going to have to watch people treat your son after that love that you had. Treat him so bad and then end up watching him die. For these ingrates who are alive and for all those who will ever live.

That's a depth of love that's hard to understand. But there's one bigger than that. There's a mind-boggling scripture that tells us we're not even close to understanding the depth of God's love. Let's go to that last scripture with me, if you will. Like you go with me to John, we read this pass overnight most of the time, as Christ is saying his high priestly prayer. But I'd like you to look at one verse. John 17 and verse 23.

Christ is saying, and I and them and you and me, that they may be made perfect. That's what he's wanting. Perfection. It can only come through God. That they may be perfect in one, and that the world may know that you have sent me, and have, this is it, loved them as, as, another translation, as much, as much, the same, that you loved them as much as you loved me.

Wow. As? Just like him? How could anyone do that? It's impossible. How could I love a woman I hardly knew, as much as I love Mary, who we spent 38 years together?

I can't understand it. But that's not what God says. He loves us as much as he loved his son, who died for us. Just as the same. We'd say that's not possible, but we do not have the mind of God, and we do not have the depth of God's love yet, but he wants us to have it. Can you imagine if we can just have a small piece of that? If we can have just a little bit of that depth, we will have no problem loving our enemies? This is what he wants from us. Hebrews 9, verse 27 through 28 tells us a story that Christ was willing to die for us. Not only die, he was tortured. And so that's why, when you know what he went through, as it says in Hebrews, he's going to die for us. Grace isn't free.

Grace. There was an ultimate price paid for it, and what Christ did for us. So that we could someday have the depth of God's love. So that we could understand how he did it, and how his father did it, and it didn't matter. Because he's going to love that guy that laid that cat of nine tails on his back, and ripped his flesh wide open.

And the guy that came up and spit on him, and he said, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they are doing. That is a depth of love. We are not near. But we will be. It's promised to us. That we may be able to comprehend the depth of God's love. Who would do that? But in loving God so far, above us. That we may be able to comprehend.

How about believe? Because that's what he wants us to do. He wants us to believe in the depth of his love. So whenever we mess up, and we all mess up, your pastor is much more than you. Mess up. And there's some distance between my father and me. And I know I need to go pray, but I don't want to. I know I need to get on my knees, but it's like, what else do I need to do first? Because I do not grasp the depth of God to love. So that all he wants is me to fall on those knees. Because he just loves me so much more. He never stops loving us. We're the ones. So if we believe in the depth of God's love for us, we can so easily put our total trust in him. We put our total future. We're not going to worry about what's going to happen to us. Because if we understood the depth of God's love, we would say, I'm going to sleep like a baby tonight. Because I know God loves me, and I have enough to understand.

The depth of God's love is something that is out of this world. But the beauty of it all is what this book says. It's coming to this world. And we get to not only comprehend discern, grasp. We believe in it.