The Dimensions of Agape Love, Pt. 1 (08/13/2023)

Brother Paul had trouble getting started because you're so fellowshipping today, that's a good bubbly group today.

It's not always that way, but it is today and it was great. I enjoy being back there watching everything and wow, the music was tremendous today, wasn't it?

Tremendous, and all you guys helped there at the end and I love hearing

Matt lead us in singing, but boy, Betsy puts that, it's like putting an organ behind it all, literally, you know?

Beautiful, and then the special was just so great, but the sermon's gonna be better.

So let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for this wonderful day and we ask you to bless your word now and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.

I guess you can tell I'm kind of excited about the biblical information we're gonna discuss today.

The Sunday school lesson today with Ben was fabulous. I sit back there and learn things from my son, which is an amazing thing, but I shouldn't be surprised at all that it's just wonderful.

And when Dave teaches, same thing, you know, it's just to have these young guys able to do that and then

Matt stepping up and helping with the music, or leading the music actually at this point, and Kenner playing the piano.

I mean, it makes it glad we always had a Christian school, doesn't it? Makes one glad. And these wonderful homes that these kids are raised in, so thank all of you for everything that you do.

Well, we are talking about marriage and family and we kind of camped out on one of the, as we spoke about the duties of the man in the home, he is supposed to be the lover in the home.

And it's a picture of Jesus, the groom, loving the bride, isn't it? And so we've kind of camped out on love for the last

Sunday or so, and we talked about God's definition for love.

If you remember, we were in, well, we've been in a couple of places. 1 Corinthians chapter 12, we talked a little bit about that, starting with verse 30, and specifically last time.

Before that, we were in 1 Corinthians 14, one through six, and a lot of different places.

We even went into part of the Apostle Paul's definition of love.

You remember that? And we talked about that, and then we're going to be talking about the dimensions of love, and that's what

I'm really excited about today. Well, in Paul's definition of love, we had this little interesting aspect where it spoke of speaking with tongues of men and angels.

It spoke of burning the body, and a lot of things in that little passage we studied last

Sunday that were hyperbole. You remember what that means? It's using a figure of speech by exaggerating things more than reality to teach a point, and that's what that is.

There is no such thing as speaking in tongues of angels, by the way. It's not shown anywhere in Scripture.

It is a figure of speech to exaggerate and make a point, which is amazing to me because whole denominations come out of that verse, and it shouldn't be so.

I just want to finish up that little part, and then I want to talk to you a minute about the dimensions of love.

But closing out the idea of the definition of love, last Sunday we talked about that very interesting passage and what it did teach, and I'd like to just end up with what it doesn't teach.

Here's what it doesn't teach. The Bible is not teaching that we can burn our bodies as a religious act.

Would you agree with that? Okay, so that's hyperbole. The Bible is not teaching that we sell everything that we have and give it to the poor because it's

Jesus himself in John 12, verse 8, that said, For the poor always you have with you.

You can't solve the problem of poverty by selling everything you have and giving it to the poor. It won't solve it, and it's not saying that we should do that.

The Bible is not teaching that we try to literally move mountains into the sea with our faith.

It's not teaching that we will do that. It's exaggeration. I know Jesus taught if God gave you the faith to do that, you could do it.

But God doesn't give you that faith and that grace without measure like he did his son. He gives it to us by measure, right?

And so it's not teaching, that's not really the point in this whole passage. It's also not teaching that we can understand all mysteries and have all knowledge, is it, as humans?

As an individual human, are you going to ever understand all the mysteries in the Bible and understand all knowledge that God has?

So it's exaggeration. We see that if we just think about it. We see it clearly. Though the

Bible does teach we can speak with languages, known languages in the world of man, if God gave us that gift, it does not teach that we can speak with tongues of angels.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. So there is no such thing as speaking in a heavenly language.

This is the language of exaggeration to make a key point. And what was the key point?

Because right in that same context is Paul's beautiful definition of love.

And what he's saying is, if you could do those things and you did it without the motive of love, it would be worthless.

That's what he was teaching. So love is the underlying gift that God gives us right next to the faith of his son,

Jesus. The Bible says when you are regenerated, which is an act that God does to you from heaven, that you have not one thing to do with it.

It's like being born physically. You're born spiritually. The baby has nothing to do with his own birth physically, and you didn't have a thing to do with your birth spiritually.

But once that great cause had happened, and while we were yet in our sins, he quickened us.

He brought us to life. Once that happened, there are many effects. Then we love him back, right?

Then we can try to obey him because we love him. And we can get baptized.

We can start going to church. We can start studying the Bible. We can start loving each other in a way we never could before we were saved.

We can love our spouse in a way we never could when we were lost. And so all of this beautiful teaching on love was the whole purpose of that exaggerated passage, was to show the importance of love.

And so it's interesting that in James 1, verse 27, it says,

It's not to go burn your body where everybody can see it. It's not to blow a trumpet when you give tithes and offerings so everybody can see you do it.

It's not to speak in some gibberish that no one else can do to show how much more spiritual you are than they are.

It's none of that. It's love. And so when God saved you, he did many things in that instant of time.

And one was he gave you the faith of Christ so that you could then have faith in Christ.

Secondly, he gave you the love of God because God came to dwell in your body, and your body became the temple of the living

God, and God is love. So now you have agape, which is a type of love that has nothing to do with the object of your love.

They can do anything to you, and it won't change the fact that you love them because it comes from the heart of the lover.

And only God can do that, and only you can do it if you have God in you. So that's what we've been talking about as far as the definition of agape love.

But this morning, I want to talk to you about the dimension of love. Turn with me to Ephesians 3, verse 14.

Okay, and let's pick it up right there. Ephesians 3, 14,

So it mentions that there is a family of God. What does that imply? Does that imply that every human being that ever lived on the earth belongs to God or that God has a family out of all those people?

You know, if you want to use a human example, not everybody in this room is in my physical family, right?

My wife, my kids, my grandkids, they're in the room, and they're in my family. The rest of you are not. But we all are part of a family here at church.

It's a larger family, and we're tied together spiritually by the Holy Spirit who connects us so we are, in fact, family.

But to use the physical example, if God says there is a family of God, it implies that there are people who are not part of that family.

Now, that's not the main teaching here, but it is clear that there is a family of God.

So let's start with that. And then it goes on and it says that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.

That is the only way we grow is we first must be saved. We must be born again. And the

Holy Spirit quickens us and brings us to life where all of a sudden we're interested in the

Bible, whereas it used to be a boring book, where all of a sudden we want to be at church and be around God's people. We used to just not want to be there.

We wanted to worship at the lake, you know what I mean? And all of those things changed when we got saved. But then when we're going to grow, it can only happen by the

Holy Spirit strengthening our inner man because our outer man is still flesh. The old man is still there and he cannot grow and won't grow.

He will sin is what he will do. So we have to be strengthened on the inner man, which is the real us.

And we live in this tent, this physical body, which can be used to glorify

God as long as it's under the proper hierarchy of control. The Holy Spirit and your spirit become one.

That means you're spirit filled. And then your spirit leads your soul, which leads your body to serve

God. When we're in that, when we're lined up the right way, we serve God with this body. But when we're not, the old man will take us down the wrong road every time.

So Paul prays for his people that they would be strengthened on the inner man by the

Holy Spirit so they can walk a spiritual life, a spirit -filled life, a good Christian life.

Why? Verse 17 says, So that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love, now comes what we're talking about, is the love that he also put in our hearts the day he saved us, which we did not have naturally.

We had phileo love, which is fellowship love, or like I'm your friend, but that sort of depends on how well you treat me.

Would you agree with that? The friendship, the like, like I like you more when you're treating me good. I like you more when you're hugging me than when you're slapping me.

Would you agree with that? That's phileo love. But agape love loves you just as much when you slap me.

Now don't try it out after church, because I might go into the flesh instantly. Who knows? But we're talking about agape love, that godly love that's in us now.

And so he talks about it there in verse 17, right at the end is Paul's prayers, that they be rooted and grounded in love.

And that is agape in the Greek right there. Now the Holy Spirit begins to show us the dimensions of God's love that's in us.

It's God's, but he puts it in. It's kind of like Jesus gives us his faith, but would you agree once someone gives you a gift, it's yours?

So when he gave us the faith of Christ, would you agree that became your faith too? When he gave you the love of God, that became your love too.

And here is the dimension of it. May be able. His prayer is that the

Holy Spirit would teach us to be able to comprehend, to understand love.

And here's how he puts it. To comprehend with all saints, he wants everyone in the church this morning, and every born again person in the world today, and every born again person that's in heaven today, like my mom and some of your loved ones who are already there.

He wants the church, all saints, to be able to comprehend what is the breadth.

Now I want you to count the dimension. Put your fingers up. How many is that? All right.

The breadth, the length, the depth, and the height.

So we live in a three -dimensional world, but God's love is four -dimensional.

Did you know that if you jump one dimension higher than the dimension you live in, that you have no comprehension of it?

If you are two -dimensional, it means you live on this plane, this flat piece of paper.

You live on it. Okay? So if I were

God and my finger was that close to it, boy, it shows me I drank too much coffee. Look at that.

Thanks for the coffee. Okay, so if I'm God and I'm three -dimensional, but you guys are two -dimensional and you live on a two -dimensional plane,

I can be this close to you and you can't know that I'm even there because I'm not in your dimension.

If I touch your dimension, you just see me as a line. If you looked at that finger hitting it, to me as God, I can see my whole body and everything about me.

Even the part of my finger hitting it at least looks like a circle. But if you're looking at that circle from this side, it looks like a straight line, and that's who you think

God is. And you see, when you start talking about the Father, that's all you know is you just see one little line.

You don't see God because God is not in space and time. Only through Jesus Christ and the

Holy Spirit does he come into time. And without Jesus, you never would have known that God, the true

God. You could not have known him without God subsisting as three distinct persons.

I don't like to use the word persons, but that's the best word we have because it's not like three people like us.

You've heard me, it's hard to talk about, but each aspect of God has personality.

The Holy Spirit has his personality. Jesus has his. The Father has his. Do you understand what

I'm saying? But they're one God. Now, we find that hard to believe, but you and I are triune as well, are we not?

Aren't we a spirit that lives in a body and has a soul? When you're thinking, are you just thinking, or are you actually talking to your other self?

Tell me. You can't talk to nothing. You have to talk to something else, and that's you too.

So there's at least two of you right there, but while you're doing it, you're feeling it and thinking it, so the feeling is your third you.

So you're just like God. You're creating his image. So it's no big thing that God exists that way, but it's hard for us to talk about it, but it's how he is.

And I'll say this. There are a lot of people, especially with Jewish influence, Jewish believer influence supposedly, that are moving away from the idea of the

Trinity. Don't move away from it. Our fathers, the founders of the

Protestant movement, and our Catholic fathers, if you want to call them that, before that, all believe in the

Trinity. There's none of them that don't. So that is well -established going back 2 ,000 years, and not to mention throughout the

Scripture is it well -established from the very earliest parts of the book of Genesis where God said, let us create man in our image in the

Hebrew. It doesn't even make sense grammatically in Hebrew, but it's in there that way. So without Jesus, you would have never known

God was even, well, you would know he was there because you could look at the stars and know that someone made it, but you wouldn't know

God. You would just see him as a line. You see, like you wouldn't know anything about him, but Jesus can come into a three -dimensional world and begin to tell parables and point out the

Old Testament prophets and teach you what they really meant when they said what they said and begin to develop a picture of a, actually,

I think at least nine -dimensional God is what I've come up with so far, but much higher than three -dimension and pull that down and try to picture him for us, even though we cannot picture the

Father, but Jesus is the word. That's why he's called the word of God. What is a word? What does a word do?

Well, it can take what Raymond is thinking and put it into my mind, and let me think that, by him simply talking to me.

He can put his thoughts, which are spiritual, into a word and transfer it to my ear, and it puts it back in the spiritual realm, and now we're thinking the same thing.

A word reveals Raymond's mind to me, and his mind is his real self.

If I can learn about what you are thinking more than what you're saying,

I know you better, all right? So Jesus is the word that transfers the spirituality and who

God is, puts it into something physical, brings it to us, and it can come and become spiritual in our mind where we know

God better. We don't fully know him, but we know him better. He's not just a line, is he?

He's not just a voice from a burning bush, is he? And yet that's all

God has done. If you look at the Father, the only place you've ever seen him appear in all of the Scripture is in a voice.

Everything else where you've seen, thought you saw God, that was the Son. That was the everlasting Son. That is

God, but it's not the Father. So all of this is interesting because now the

Son of God, through the Apostle Paul and the Holy Spirit, the two aspects of God who are in time and space are beginning to try to broaden

God where he's not just a line to us. He's taking, the

Holy Spirit is taking this great, the attribute of God that the Bible says

God is, which is love. It doesn't say he has it. It says he is it. And yet we can't see

God, can we? And he's beginning to show us through his Word and transport that spiritual definition and picture of God to us in our minds through the

Word of God. And the first thing that he says about it is that it has breadth.

So let's think about that a minute. Now, it has four dimensions, so already it's higher than our ability to comprehend totally.

But the Holy Spirit is gonna try to bring it down to three -dimensional people and teach us about a four -dimensional aspect of God.

And I believe there are at least nine dimensions, but we can talk about that some other time. But here we have four, so it's beyond our ability.

Without the Holy Spirit, without the Bible, it would be totally beyond our ability to comprehend

God's love. But we have a Bible. How much did we neglect it, though?

But we have it. And to the extent that we don't, we can learn about God. Now, this is quite amazing.

So he may be able to comprehend with all saints, the whole church, at least those who study, the breadth, the length, and the depth and the height, and to know the love of Christ, which passes all knowledge.

That's why we have to be taught this because we're three dimensions. He's beyond that. It passes all knowledge that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.

You can't even be totally Spirit -filled if you don't understand this lesson about the four dimensions of God's love.

And just the agape, not even talking about the phileo love, God has that for us, too. He likes us.

That's hard to believe. I mean, if you think it's hard to believe that he has agape for us, it's really hard to believe that he likes us.

But he does. So he loves us and he likes us. And so the Holy Spirit here in this passage is gonna help us to understand better something that passes our ability to have knowledge of.

That's pretty special. And that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. That means being

Spirit -filled to the utmost that you can be in this life. Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, so he is able to teach us into the fourth dimension.

According to the power that works in us, who is that? Tell me.

Y 'all were all bubbly before church. Don't get sleepy during the preaching. Okay, come on. What? Holy Spirit.

The power that is in us, he is able to do this because it's not only the power that's in us, it's the power that works in us.

Unto him be glory in the church by Christ because he's in time and space with us but the glory goes to the

Father which is outside of time and space always and always shall be.

Unto him be glory in the church by Jesus Christ throughout all ages. There are eight, by the way, in the

Greek where everywhere you see the word all ages in English, it means age unto age.

That is an infinite number of ages after the millennial kingdom. We're in the church age.

Next is the millennial kingdom. Next is an age and then an age and an age and dot, dot, dot. Have you ever put like a couple of mirrors in a room where when you stand and look, it looks like you can keep seeing more and more images to infinity?

That's really cool. I don't remember how you make that happen. Do you have to have two mirrors to make that happen? I have to have a mirror looking at a mirror.

Okay, well, picture that. That's how many ages there will be.

All of those have time in them. You hear people say, well, when we die, we go into heaven, there's no time.

That's not true. Now, time works different there, but there is time. Anyway, look at all that.

From just verse 14 to 21, he takes us from a three -dimensional world into a four -dimensional world and promises to teach us what this means.

Paul is praying in this passage. He asks God on behalf of his converts.

Paul prays for his converts, and he asks God on behalf of them that he would strengthen them with might by his

Spirit on their inner man, and he asks them to strengthen with might and bring at least three results.

One is this, that Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith. Spiritual birth, he wants to make sure they are born spiritually, and the ongoing relationship that results, that's the first thing he asks.

He wants them to be saved and to be growing. Secondly, that they would be rooted and grounded in agape.

That means they don't only just have it because when they were a baby Christian, they had it. As soon as you got saved and knew nothing about the

Bible yet, you already had this four -dimensional God thing called agape love in you.

So you had it, but you didn't know how to use it yet, and you didn't understand it yet. And his second prayer is they would become rooted and grounded in it.

Now that's even beyond just a rudimentary understanding. It's like it becomes the root of your life.

You can judge imperfectly. You can judge a tear from a wheat somewhat because the wheat will be kind, gentle -hearted.

The tear will be criticizing everything about you. But I say imperfect because some baby

Christians will do that too, won't they? Because they have not been grounded and rooted in the love of God yet.

So we have to be really careful when we judge. Now when I say judge, I mean discern. We're supposed to try to discern because you have to be careful too.

You have to be careful who you trust. So you want to trust Christians who have unfamed love.

That means people can come in and fake it for a while. But after a few months, they're going to start arguing about the color of the carpet.

If they're a tear, they're just not going to like that carpet that you guys already picked. They're just going to have a better way. Now listen, a

Christian who is grounded in the love can also have a better way, but he has a different way of saying it.

Do you understand what I'm saying? He says it in kindness. He says it, let's think together about this.

We all love each other. Let's pray about whether maybe the new carpet should be dark blue, royal.

What do you think? And he'll try to do it in love. I mean, to be rooted and grounded in love is what makes a church have peace.

It's the only thing that can make a church full of human beings have peace.

Do they always agree with each other on every point? Never will. But if they're rooted and grounded in love, they can walk together in this world and fight the fight together because we have a much bigger foe in this world than each other.

And he is unhappy right now because he knows how little time he has left.

He just burned up a portion of one of the most beautiful places on the planet earth last week.

Probably 500 people to a thousand people are dead and they don't even know it yet. They haven't found them. So the second thing is that Paul is praying that they be rooted and grounded in love.

The third thing is that his converts may comprehend the breadth, the length, the depth, and the height of the love of Christ, which is beyond natural human knowledge and that through understanding this love, they might be filled with the fullness of God.

You know, we talk about being spirit -filled church. It is very difficult for a church to be spirit -filled when it has not comprehended the love of God yet.

Oh, it can talk in gibberish. It can make arms stretch out and pretend that's a healing.

It can even have some healings by the power of Satan in some cases. Not all of it's that, but some of it is that.

Sometimes it's just learned responses because they see other people doing it and they mimic it. But that does not make them spirit -filled.

If they don't understand with a full comprehension the four dimensions of God's love, then just like this says, they don't have the fullness of God yet and that's what spirit -filledness is.

It's being filled with God. So there are a lot of lessons in this little passage. Now, let's begin to break these down a little bit.

Let's look at the breadth of God's love. This word for breadth is platos.

Now, if I just said plat, what would you think of? Some of you guys that have done some engineering or construction, what would you think of?

What is a plat? Katie's done a bunch lately. What's a plat? It could be a picture of the land that you just recorded down at the county and you now own it, right?

You have a plat, which shows all the acreage around you and squares yours out and the county knows it because you pay taxes on that plat, right?

So that's the best place to go look at your plat is go down to the county and to the tax office and say, let me see my plat.

But that word comes from the Greek word platos and it comes to mean width or breadth in its simplest meaning.

Like if you look it up in Strong's, it'll say width or breadth. So it's a good translation. The King James authors translated this word platos into breadth in English.

Very good translation, like almost all of their translations are. It comes from a

Greek root word, plosso, which is a verb that means to mold something, to shape or fabricate something.

Now, would you agree that a plat is sort of one dimensional?

Like a plat is kind of like this, right? I should say two, I meant to say two dimensional, right?

A plat looks like this. Now you can turn it this way and look at the picture, but it looks like that.

And so the root word means to mold something or fabricate something or form it, but it is something that has width to it.

So I want you to picture this. Picture a mom or in some cases, a dad, which in our house, it's not that way because I'm about to talk about the kitchen.

And so I do try to dry dishes sometimes, but I mean, that's about it in the kitchen for me.

And I'm not saying that's a good thing. That's just how it is in our family. So maybe in your family, the man is the cook, but I'm going to picture how it is in mine.

So you got mom in there, in the kitchen, and I want you to picture Charlotte flattening some dough.

She's either going to make a pizza or you could picture Ashton flattening some dough because she likes to make bread, homemade bread.

How many of the rest of you do that? Raise your hand if you do that at home. All right, you've done that, right?

So you take this instrument and what is the instrument called that you flatten the dough with?

A rolling pin, all right? And you spread it out. You probably tap it with your hands all around first, right?

And you flatten it and then she rolls it with a rolling pin. How many of you ever had a rolling dock, excuse me, a rolling docker?

Do you know what that is? Raise your hand, ladies or men, if you know what that is. Okay, usually it's only professionals that use it, like at a pizza place where they're in the back.

I bet if Dave Senior were here, he would know. He would know the answer, but you've seen it.

You just didn't know the name of it. It's a thing with a handle and a little round thing that has spikes on it.

And you roll that over and it puts little holes in the dough. You've seen it. How many of you have used it and you just didn't know the name of it?

All right, so what that does is makes it when you cook the dough, it doesn't have bubbles in it or as many bubbles.

And it's good for pizza, right? I don't know if you even need it in bread. You kind of want the bread to bubble up, right?

But picture Charlotte in there and she rolls that thing over there and gets it flat. Now, you know, if you're doing pizza, you picture it as a circle, but it's two -dimensional.

It's flat. Do you agree? All right, now let's just take that as the picture. And how many of you had a little bit of geometry in junior high and high school?

Probably everybody might not have known what it was called, but you learned how to draw circles, right, with a compass, right?

Remember that? And if you can remember the study of geometry, the way we talk about a circle is it has a center point, doesn't it?

If you want to really be a mathematician, you call it a focus. None of us call it that. We call it the center point.

Even in math, we call it the center point, but mathematicians would call it the focus because it is the thing that makes the circle happen.

It's the center point. And the way you actually make a circle is you put an infinite number of what we would call lines, but in geometry, you call it a ray.

Because a ray is a line with an arrow on the end of it, and the arrow typifies that it goes forever.

It has a starting point at the focus, but going that way, it never ends.

That's a ray in geometry. So if you could picture, now let's put a point at the end, though, rather than an arrow where it stops at some point.

And if you put an infinite number of rays around the focal point, and in each end of that ray, you put a line at a right angle, and each one, you put those lines around, you just created a circle.

Now you say, that's not how I draw a circle. I just stick that thing in there and do that. That's right, but the truth is, geometrically, that's how you calculate all the dimensions of a circle.

Everything about a circle is calculated that way. So that, in actuality, that's how a circle is created.

Now, what if you take those right angles off? So now we've got a piece of dough that Charlotte's flattened out, and it's round.

And we take the right angle lines away, and the end point away, and put little arrows at the end of all those rays.

What does that look like? Somebody tell me what that would look like.

Well, I would love it, because it would be an infinitely large pizza. Do you need a take -home bag for that?

Nope, I got one right here. I've never in my life ever used a take -home bag, especially not for Italian, but can you picture that?

So picture, it goes out in all directions to infinity. That's what breadth means in Greek, when it talks about God's love.

That one dimension is, it's like a circle that goes out in all directions forever.

And I would add something to it. If you then took rays of the same length, let's put an end point on them first, and you put them at every angle, all the way around that focal point, but they all had end points, what would you create?

A basketball, right? You could play basketball, that would create a sphere.

Now, what if you put arrows at the end of all those rays, though? What do you have? What does that look like?

In all directions. That's really what the breadth of God's love looks like. The Holy Spirit teaches us about a four -dimensional thing with just words and grammar in the

Greek, and this is why God wrote the Bible in Greek. There's people out there now saying, oh, well, the original actually is written in Aramaic.

And a certain group of church over in one of the stands, Pakistan, one of the stand countries, former

Soviet Union, their original New Testament was in Aramaic, not

Latin or Greek, and they'll try to convince you that that's the closest to the original. Don't listen to that. God wrote it in Greek.

He even took, like Ben mentioned in Sunday School, he even took the Old Testament, which is Hebrew, with some

Aramaic in it, very little, basically Hebrew, and he put it in Greek in the

Septuagint. And when you look at Jesus and the apostles quoting the Old Testament, they quoted it in the

Greek version. Isn't that fascinating? So Greek is the language the

Holy Spirit used to paint pictures so that we can try to understand a higher -dimensional being than we are.

Otherwise, we would just see God as a line. So here we start to see just from the words, just from the word that the

Holy Spirit chose, we see that the breadth of God's love is infinite.

Now, in geometry, we learn that a circle is made by these rays, and here we see a globe we can picture, and these rays have an arrow at the end and it goes out in all directions.

There is no end to them, and that's the picture. Now, if we took this and laid it, what if you wanted to come back a little bit, though, and put endpoints on there?

So now you had Charlotte's dough goes out flat in all directions, but it has an endpoint, but it's big enough to lay it across the surface of the earth so that it covers the earth, everything on the earth.

Well, there's a certain aspect of that that pictures God's love. So let me get you to think about this.

In Romans 8, verse 35, we're still just talking about the breadth of His love, okay? Romans 8, 35, it says,

Who shall separate us from the agape, from the love of Christ? And I want you to listen to the first things that are listed here, because everything that is is gonna be listed here, because this is talking about the breadth of God's love, too, but everything that is is gonna be listed, but look at the first list and tell me where this group would be.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation... Think about what these things are.

Tribulation, that's trouble. How many of you have some trouble in your life? Raise your hand. How many of you had some this week?

How many of you had some today already? Well, you hadn't even gotten home yet, so don't give up on it, right?

Okay, shall tribulation separate us from agape love? Okay, how about distress?

What is distress? That's when we worry about the tribulation. Some hands would go up there.

Or persecution. We as the church are being persecuted in America a lot, but we individually in our little protected church here in our homes, we're pretty good off right now in Texas, aren't we?

But not in Austin, you wouldn't be. But we ain't in Austin, hallelujah. All right?

So, persecution is real, and it will touch all of us over the next few years, but it's real.

But think about where it is, okay? And famine. Okay, now how many days of 115 degree weather in Florida and Texas and some parts of California can you have and not have any fruit to eat next time the season comes?

Not have enough wheat or corn. You say, oh, that could never happen to America. You don't think

God could bring a famine to America? Oh, my goodness. The weatherman can do that, so he can do it.

God can, that's a joke. Anyway, it's a bad one, but yeah. Famine, nakedness.

Like, you don't even have any factories making clothes anymore, and if you did, you can't afford them. Terror, or sword, war.

So, where are all of those things? Because those are the first thing Paul mentions when he says, this group of things cannot separate us from God's love.

Picture that dough covering the whole earth. So, all of those are things on the earth, right?

Well, God's love covers all that. God's love is bigger than all of that.

All right, now, another thing we can think about when we look at...

I'll wait till I get to it. So, let's go to... Well, then it goes, let me read this a little further there in Romans 8.

As it is written, for thy sake, we are killed all the day long. So, that's part of stuff on this earth that can happen to Christians, to God's people.

And we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. That's part of the persecution that can happen.

Nay, in all these things are we more than conquerors through him that, what?

Loved us. It is the love of God that gets us through those things. All right, now, that's just on the earth.

That could be part of the breadth of God's love. Now, let's look at the word length for a minute.

The word length in the Greek is meikos, which means length, okay?

It's from a root word, meikuno, which means to lengthen or to enlarge.

It can be translated to cause something to grow up, but it's talking about something that's, it's a certain length, but it's lengthening.

Okay? So, if you, in geometry, take a line, as what we call a line, it's really depicted as a segment with dots on the end.

We call that a line. That's really not a line. It's a segment with dots on the end. But if you draw arrows on both ends, that's now a line.

So, a genuine line in geometry goes forever in both directions. Okay? That would picture

God's eternal nature, but if you put a dot on one end and an arrow on the other, that's now a what?

That's a ray. That's how you make circles, for one thing, but if it just goes in a straight line, that picture's everlasting life for us, which had a start, which is where the dot is, but it never ends.

Are you with me? All right? So, length here, when you talk about the love of God, the length concept of it is picturing the eternal nature of it.

In other words, we just covered a few things on the earth, which, would you agree, everything on this earth is finite?

It's gonna end, isn't it? Even if you went through the worst persecution and suffering that could possibly happen to your family, it would end eventually, wouldn't it?

Because everything on this earth ends eventually. Ben talked about it at length at Sunday school today, the prophecies of when that happens, but it would end.

But when you talk about God's love, it has to go farther than enough love to take care of the finite stuff.

It also takes care of the infinite stuff. All right? So here, the line, the length of it pictures that.

How far in each direction in geometry does a line go? It goes to infinity, both directions, so it pictures never -ending, eternal nature of God's love.

Now, let's talk about the depth for a minute. This is the Greek word bathos.

And, no, it doesn't mean bath. Sounds like it, doesn't it? It literally means profundity.

What is something that is profound? What does that mean? Import? Yes, that's part of the meaning.

Profound is a big word. So it's something that's very important.

What's another one? It sets it apart from other stuff that's more mundane, right?

What was yours? It's important because it sets itself apart from... What else does profound mean?

Extraordinary? Above. Let's just stop right there. So everything you said is part of this word, and that last one, we needed it, because it means some of it you can't understand.

There's something out there that's a little bit beyond your ability to understand it, but you understand a lot of it.

You understand enough of it to talk about it with each other. But it's profound when you talk about it, and what you mean by that is, eh,

I don't have... Really, the more questions I ask about it, the more questions it produces.

Right? So when you talk about the depth of God's love, it means it's profound beyond our ability to completely understand it, but the

Holy Spirit and the Word of God can teach us parts, like all of you had a part of it. More and more, the longer we live on this earth, and then when we get to heaven, for all eternity, remember that age and age, we'll be learning more and more, but we'll never understand all of it, because we're not

God. Never will we understand all of the profound nature of God's love, ever. But when

I think of depth of God's love, it's deep, bathos, comes from a little root word, bainos, which means the base of something, and that's a big

Roman word, because they had the basis. The word basis in English comes from it. It's like the foundation for something beautiful, like a beautiful building, and the

Greeks would do the same thing. So the Greek word for the English word basis is huge, because in all of architecture, in all the building of the

Greeks and the Romans, it's got to have that foundation and that basis and those pillars that hold the next floor up, and just picture all of that.

That's kind of the root meaning of this word, and so it's like you're laying it down, and you're laying down the basis for everything else.

That's what God's love is. So you can study all of the Bible all of your life, and all the wonderful attributes of God, and all the doctrines of the

Bible, but you'll never get away from the fact that the basis of all of it is love. Not a tinkling brass, not a trumpet that you blow to be seen as religious, not burning yourself or speaking in some angelic language that you don't even know about.

You have no way of knowing that there even is one, because every angel, it's every spoken language, human language on earth.

Not that, but love. Love is the point. It is the basis for everything.

Profundity, that is mystery. Even the Greek word carries this idea of mystery.

There's a mystery to the knowledge that we have. There's a mystery, because there's still knowledge we can yet learn. You get it?

About God's love. It's deep. You can also picture the eternal line.

Now, this is kind of interesting. One other thought that I'll get to later, probably not today.

When we speak of the depth of God's love, it's certainly to us we picture going down into the deep of the ocean, right?

It can picture going up, the length of God's love can picture going up into the heavenlies and heavenly thoughts that are beyond the globe, more eternal things.

And that's found in the Romans 8 chapter 2, where it talks about things that are not seen.

Those things can't separate us from God either. Things in the spiritual realm, demons, they cannot separate us from the love of God.

So His love is not just covering the stuff that happens to us in a finite way on the globe.

Now put arrows on the rays, and it goes out as far as you can see, which includes all of the third heaven, where all the demons might be at any given moment or might not be.

All of the universe, the other planets, where maybe some of these demons dwell there and they get in their little UFOs and fly here and look at us and go back.

And it covers all of that. None of that can separate us from the love of God. So depth can indicate things going all the way to hell, if you want to picture that as well.

So now let's talk about the fourth dimension, which is height. In the

Greek, it's hoopsos. And if Dave were here, he'd say, see, I knew basketball was spiritual. Paul would say it easier.

Hoopsos, good word for you to learn, Paul. It means elevation or altitude.

It sometimes is translated into the sky in the English Bible. It can mean dignity, like a higher character than another person.

God's love is a higher, with more dignity than human love, right?

That sort of thing. It's been translated into the phrase to be exalted.

It can be translated into the word the height of something, which it is in this particular verse. It can mean high elevation.

It comes from the Greek root word hooper. It's almost like Cooper. Hooper, which means over.

All right, like over something of place or above something or beyond something or superior to something or more than something or exceeding everything else.

That's what the little prefix in Greek means, hooper. If you put that in front of another word, it means it's higher than the word.

Whatever that word is, it's higher than that. So that's the root meaning of height is the grandeur of God's love.

It is exalted. It's higher than anything else that there is anywhere in the known universe and even beyond.

This could picture the eternal line moving all the way to heaven, the height of God's love.

Romans 8 .38 says this, I am persuaded that neither death, now remember how it mentioned, it mentioned persecution and tribulation and the things that happened on the earth in verse 37.

Romans 8 .38 then takes it beyond that. So God's love has to be bigger than just to cover things that happen on the earth.

If I am persuaded that neither death nor life, now when it says death here, it means what happens after death.

Like death, it's physical death cannot separate you from the love of God because there's something that happens after physical death, correct?

That's what it's talking about. Neither death nor life, life on this earth or if you die, none of that matters with regard to you never being separated from God's love, nor angels.

Now here we get into the spiritual realm of beings you cannot even see unless they choose to let you see them. Why is that?

Because they're in a higher dimension. Picture yourself as in two, even though we're in three. That angel can be flying all around your house and protecting you from the bad dudes that are trying to come and get you, but you can't see them unless they touch the dimension you're in, in which case they look like what they look like in the garden where Jesus was resurrected and everybody fell on their face and the

Roman guards fell on their face unconscious. It was such a frightening sight when he put his finger there and let them see him.

They're all around us right now. They were around your car when you drove, even if you drove two blocks, protecting you.

Brother Myron lost his eldest son on about a five block drive.

Fire truck hit him, hit his car and killed him. But guess what?

God's love did not allow Myron and Tony and the whole family or the one that died to be separated from God's love.

It's bigger than that. So neither death nor life nor angelic beings that most of the time you can't see nor principalities.

That talks about the dark side of the angels, the dark, the bad angels, the fallen angels, the principalities and the hierarchy of Satan's beings that are always trying to thwart

God's will in our lives but can't because they can't stop God's will. None of that separates us from God's love, principalities nor powers.

That can be the angelic powers, but it can also be kings on the earth that can try to take your freedom away by the tax or by the weapons or they may come in your house and just say, it's not yours anymore.

Those powers, those powers cannot stand up against the height of God's love nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth.

Nothing can separate us from that love. And that's to me what the height of the love means.

It is expanding everything, putting an arrow on the rays and taking it out to everything that exists, even in the unseen world of the third heaven and all of that.

It includes all of that. God's love is better than all that and can take his people through all of that.

Nor any other creature shall be able to, that means any other created thing in the

Greek, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So we could look at it geometrically and then we could look at it philosophically as well.

It's kind of interesting when you want to talk about the breadth of God's love, the profundity of God's love.

Romans 8, 9b, the second half of that verse says, nor any other creation, any other thing in all the created universe shall be able to separate us from the love of God.

It's so profound. So we can look at it geometrically or we can look at it philosophically as well.

To me the breadth of love is the heart of God's love.

The heart that it comes from. God's heart. It's shown by the outstretched arms of Jesus when they nailed him to the cross.

That's the breadth of God's love. It could never have been shown any other way than that.

Therefore Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit. It was God's will. People don't understand that because they don't understand

God but it was God's will for them to fall. The Bible says Jesus was crucified before the foundation of the world.

It had to happen because how can you show the breadth of God's love without a cross? And without his only son on that cross dying for the sins of God's people.

So I see the cross and the breadth of God's love, the outstretched arms of Jesus on that cross, the bleeding hands and feet and brow of Christ shows the breadth of God's love.

His love is spread out flat so that it can be molded and shaped and fabricated within our hearts but also cover everything in the known universe.

And when I think of the length of God's love, I think about the strength of his love. I think about the fact that it lasts as long as eternity lasts, which is forever.

It lasts beyond the ages unto ages. The world without end, age unto age is so many phrases.

Ben and I have been looking those up lately. There's, I don't know how many there are. We hadn't counted them all yet. Where that phrase is found.

The millennial kingdom, then the next one, then the next one, then the next age and the next age and the next age and the next age.

And you go out into all of those ages and God's love is longer than all of that.

The length of his love is eternal and extends beyond all of that. And the Bible says there comes a time when

Jesus will turn everything over, including us in Christ, and we will all be in God.

Now that'll blow your mind. There won't be any stuff anymore. It's all pure spirit being and we'll be in him.

I remember I told brother Otis one day, I said, it kind of upsets me. Brother Otis, we were having coffee.

I said, it kind of upsets me when I think about the fact that the Bible says no man had seen God at any time except the son who came out from him.

And it just bothers me, brother Otis, that I'll never see God the father. Oh, brother

David, don't worry. You'll see God. And he takes a sip of coffee and he says, you'll see

God through the eyes of Jesus. So the height is the eternal nature.

The depth, I see the soul of God's love, the feeling, the emotion, the profundity of it.

It's human and yet it's divine. We're creating his image. Therefore we can be a container of this love.

Like Jesus, his body was a container of this love. We can be a container of this love, but it's so profound.

We don't even understand it all, but it's in us and we can grow in it. And that was Paul's prayer that we grow in that love.

The soul of love is the depth. It is the profound and mysterious and deep part of God's love.

And it's just as profound as the very existence of God is. You think, well, how can he exist?

There was no one to make him. I don't know. The first question I'm going to ask him is not, well, where'd you come from?

Because he didn't come from anywhere. I'm going to ask him, how'd you do that? That's the question. But his love is just as profound as that question is because he has always been loved.

That is his existence. You could not have God, if he didn't exist as a

Trinity, by the way, or a triune being, because love always has to have an object.

The father had to have an object even before he made anything. So he had the Holy Spirit and Jesus to love and they had each other to love and they were perfectly fine without us, but they wanted us.

Isn't that nice? They wanted us. He wanted us. So when

I think about the breadth of God's love, I think about it's as profound as the very essence of God himself, for God is love.

It is the basis, the base, and the footing of all other aspects of human relationships with each other and with God.

It is both that with each other and with God. It's like the foundation of everything we do here at church and in our homes.

And then when I think of the height of God, I think of the mind behind the love, the intellectual part of loving on purpose, loving because you chose to love.

It comes from the mind, infinite mind of God. It is predetermined.

It is foreknown. It is never ending. It is brought to pass in time and based upon God's integrity alone, but it is from heaven and extends as a ray forever after it comes to pass in time.

It is the basis of everything. Now, we're out of time, so I'm going to stop there, but I'm not done yet.

So I did describe the four dimensions to you, though, and everything I've got on that at this point in my life.

And next time, though, we've got to end up this little study. And believe it or not, we will end it in Ephesians chapter one and Romans chapter nine.

So think about that, and we'll see you next time. Let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you so much for your word.

We thank you for the beautiful music we had in our service today and how you've gifted people to be able to do that and gifted all of us to be able to sing with them to the best of our ability.

And Lord, we thank you for your word, which your Holy Spirit has taught us today and for putting it down in words so that we, in a three -dimensional world, could start to understand things from higher dimensions.

Lord, thank you that the basis of everything about us even being here is to the praise of the glory of your grace, and your grace is a component of your infinite basis of love.

Lord, thank you that you have chosen us to be loved, because once that love started for us, it goes forever.

And Lord, thank you that we can see from Scripture that as far as where it started with you, the love that you have for us doesn't have a point at the beginning of our lifetime as a

Christian. It had an arrow on it and went the other way for eternity because you have always known us before the foundation of the world and loved us as your own.

Lord, go with us into our time of fellowship. Bless the meal we're about to have in Jesus' name. Amen.