I want you to know all about Christ’s love, although it is too wonderful to be measured. Then your lives will be filled with all that God is.

Ephesians 3:19 Contemporary English Version

 

The Apostle Paul did not pray for the Ephesians that they will love Christ more but for them to know more of Christ's love. Many believers are taught that they need to love God for Him to love them back. This is not the gospel. Rather, it is by establishing ourselves in Christ's love that we have the boldness to love vulnerably and deeply.

Over the years the Church of Ephesus somehow overlooked this prophetic prayer of Paul. In Revelation 2:1-7, Jesus rebuked the Ephesians and told them that they don't have as much love as they used to. They were hard-working believers who laboured out of their love for God—and not out of God's love for them. In other words, they have become a busy and non-loving community because they have forgotten who they are in Christ and what He has called them to be through Him.

Being loved by Christ is the basis and source of becoming loving towards others. 

When we lack this revelation of being loved by God Himself, we are not freed to love others and accept them with more understanding, compassion, and endurance. Then we will create excuses to justify why we can't show love to the people around us every day. Paul was such an individual. Paul was zealous for God, but it was in a wrong way. He was persecuting the Christians and having them killed or imprisoned. But when Paul's eyes were opened to God's grace—he could even reach out to the Gentiles and win them for Christ at a time when they were deemed as unclean and undeserving by Jewish standards. 

Paul would go and tell us that it is the love of Christ that compels him to not judge people by what they seem to be but to see them as Christ sees them (2 Corinthians 5:14, 16). This is also God's intent for us. Pray for God to remove the scales from our eyes and the stones in our hearts so that you may know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge. It is through His wondrous revelation that you will be filled with all that God is. God is love and when we are filled with the fullness of His love, then loving others is not hard, it is effortless and restful.