Deep and Wide

Ephesians, the third chapter, verse 14 through verse 21. For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth arrives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through the spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who was able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever, amen. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. 

Well, good morning, church. And happy Father's Day to you dads out there. I was thinking this morning, there's probably not a harder job that I've ever had in my life and one that I failed at more than being a dad. And, you know, that's kind of it. And so if you're in the grind right now and feeling it as a dad, just rest assured you're not the only one.

I also thought that, you know, some things that I've kind of tried to guide myself as a dad over the years that have helped me, I share with you just briefly is one, show up. You know, as it show up, even if you don't know what you can do or how you can do it, if you have nothing to offer, you feel like just show up. The second is to give what you got.

I don't always feel like I have much to give, but give what you got. And the third is to show yourself grace when you fall short. And so I offer that for what it's worth to you dads out there today who may feel that grind like I do so much as well.

Today, I want to share with you as I'm thinking about our children's church song that we are talking about today, it reminds me of a story from my past and on Memorial Day of 1999, I loaded up 45 youth and adults and took off from Crossville, Tennessee, across country to Pueblo Pentada, New Mexico to spend a week at a Navajo reservation, to help do some work there and to learn about their culture and to expose the kids to a different aspect than we were used to and in the upper Cumberland area on the plateau. We spent a week there working with the Navajo people. And then after that, we decided that we were gonna go see some other things.

We were close to some other things. I'll tell you that one of the things about that trip is that it happened about three weeks before I got married. And so for the most part of the last month, that before I got married, I was gone and out of the state.

And so that's, my timing's never been great on that, but while we were out there, we decided that it would be good being relatively close to go on and see the Grand Canyon. And so we took the kids and spent a day at the Grand Canyon and that was on June the 1st. And the thing I remember about that is on June the 1st, it snowed on us at the Grand Canyon, which I thought was pretty amazing and surreal.

Also remember that while we were there, exploring this pack of mule deer started basically climbing the canyon, which was amazing to me. Their hooves, they would literally just dig into the side of the canyon and pull themselves up. They weren't on a path, they were literally just kind of climbing up the side of the canyon.

But the memory that I carry with me the most is I gathered all of those who were on the trip with us up at the overlook, at the look there that had just a premier view of the canyon right at sunset. And I said our devotional time this evening is to just watch the sunset. And I remember sitting there and just, they were squirming and they were giggling and talking and then all of a sudden things just got quiet as they became mesmerized as the sunset over the Grand Canyon.

And I remember as I got caught up in it, I realized I had tears in my eyes and I looked around and I wasn't the only one and then out of the blue, one of the youth that was there on the trip with us started singing, oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. As we all just sort of experienced the awe and wonder and majesty of God's glory that we were witnessing in that moment. That is a time I'll never forget.

The Grand Canyon is a massive, massive expanse. I think it's one of those things that you can't appreciate until you've seen it with your own eyes. There's really no way to explain it and I couldn't fully understand it until I saw it with my own eyes.

I did some research just to kind of give us some thoughts about how big it is if you haven't been there. From east to west of the Grand Canyon is roughly 277 miles. From the easternmost point to the westernmost point.

From the north to the south of this expanse is about 15 to 18 miles on average and the average depth of the Grand Canyon is over one mile in places. For comparison, let's look at Wilson County, Tennessee. Our own county here.

Wilson County from north to south is about 15 to 20 miles, about the same as the Grand Canyon but from east to west it's about 30 miles long and so the Grand Canyon is roughly nine times longer wide than Wilson County. In order to understand that we'd have to start the Grand Canyon about 30 something miles east of here, let's say at the Putnam County line and if that's where the Grand Canyon started it would end at the Mississippi River, at the Arkansas border, west of Memphis. That's how long the Grand Canyon would be.

It's an unbelievable thing to witness, to understand how massive it is and that's the image I use to think about when I think about our children's church song for today. The song is deep and wide. How many of you all grew up singing that? A bunch of you.

I don't think our kids sing it as much today. John, do they sing deep and wide as much? No, it's kind of run its course. I did hear from Glenda Davis today that Megan Hutto is the queen of deep and wide, that she used to come home singing it all the time and so I do know that it has been sung at this church at some point but the thing about this song if you're not familiar with, it's a real upscale song, it's a real fast paced song and what makes it that way is basically you're just singing the same line over and over, deep and wide, deep and wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide.

But what makes it that way is every time you sing through it, you sing it faster and faster and faster where the kids are trying to keep up with it and the other thing about it is over time, you would substitute the deep and the wide part with gestures and so instead of saying deep, you would go deep and instead of going wide, you would go wide and so you're singing it. There's a fountain flowing and so you're having to do all those things and you're doing it faster and faster so I thought maybe we could try it together as a congregation since most of you all knew it. This is gonna be like vacation Bible school and I'm gonna be the worst music director for VBS ever and we're gonna sing this song together so we're gonna sing it once through just normal, no gestures or anything, we're just gonna sing it, ready? Deep and wide, deep and wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide, deep and wide, deep and wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide.

All right, good job now. We're gonna sing it through at that speed but instead of saying deep, you're gonna go like this, instead of saying wide, you're gonna go like this, everything else, you're still gonna sing, okay? You ready? And there's a fountain flowing and there's a fountain flowing. All right, one more time, Dixie.

Keep up, keep up. We're gonna do it fast this time, ready? Hmm and hmm, hmm, and hmm, there's a fountain flowing and hmm, hmm, and hmm, there's a fountain flowing. That's pretty good.

I'm not gonna go faster than that, I'm not sure I can keep up, so. The song speaks of a fountain that flows deep and wide and I don't know the origins of this but my mind goes to a prophecy in the book of Ezekiel. Now Ezekiel had a lot of prophecies, probably his most famous is the Valley of Dry Bones and we know there's a children's song on that one as well but this may be my favorite prophecy that Ezekiel has.

He talks about where in his vision that he had, that he saw this little stream, just a little brook maybe but he said as he followed it out, it got bigger and bigger and wider and wider and the water grew deeper and deeper and it came with more agitation and more force it was going until it was a full on river that opened up into the Dead Sea and the cool thing about it, he said, is that everywhere it went, life sprang up. Trees and grass and flowers, people were fishing to catch fish and as it spilled into the Dead Sea, called the Dead Sea because it's so salty that nothing can live in there, that it overpowered the saltiness of the Dead Sea and life sprung up in it and I just love that imagery of this vision that Ezekiel is giving to us. It's a metaphor obviously for us of how God's love is moving through the world around us, how God's plan for us is growing day by day and as it continues to move through the world in which we live, it gets bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger and it's rooted in God's love for us and it comes to the culmination, it spills into the Dead Sea with the birth of Jesus, the one who said, I am living water, water that gives life to everywhere it goes.

Remember when he goes up and it has an encounter with the woman at the well, he says to her, if you knew the gift of God and who it was that was asking you for a drink, you would ask him and he would give you living water, water that gives life. Whoever drinks of the water that I give them will never thirst. Indeed, it will become springs of water welling up to eternal life.

It will give life. For me to understand how deep and wide the Grand Canyon was when I saw it with my own eyes, helped me to grasp how truly big God's love is and that's truly inspiring to me. In our text for today, what we see is Paul writing to the church at Ephesus and he's trying to help them to understand this very thing, just how deep and how wide God's love is.

He says that he prays that they will be rooted and established in love. To be rooted and established in love, that has to be the foundation, they have to be planted just as John talked about with the kids that had to be in the pot for it to grow so that you can grasp how wide and how long and how high and how deep the love of Christ is. He continues, I want you to understand that this love surpasses all knowledge.

In other words, I would translate that to mean it just doesn't make sense because we think we understand how love works and how we have to earn that love and that's not how God's love works, it doesn't make sense to us. It passes all knowledge that we can get and that's a normal sort of thing for Paul to come to. He wrote another part of the Bible, another letter to another church in Corinth that kind of is known as the love chapter and he hits it that same sort of principle in that when he's trying to help people to understand how big God's love is.

He says, you can have all kinds of knowledge. I mean, you can have knowledge that you can speak in all kinds of different languages, you can have knowledge that lets you to have all these different kinds of gifts or that allows you to prophesy and you can have all knowledge so that you can answer all of the world's questions, all of life's questions. But if you can't grasp love, then you have nothing.

You can have all the knowledge in the world but if you don't understand love, in particular God's love, then you have nothing. I think this is an important thing. For those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus to make sure that we understand, that we get in our own lives, that we can know everything about Jesus.

We can quote everything Jesus has ever said. We can know the Bible front to back, be able to quote you chapter and verse but if we're not rooted in God's love, then we're truly unable to understand what the Bible is trying to say to us, what it's really truly about that we can't grasp just how wide and how deep and how high and how long God's love is. We're missing the point.

If we don't understand and aren't rooted in God's love. What scripture tries to tell us time and time again is that it's so much more than we can ever get our mind around, it just doesn't make sense to us. In fact, our text ends after reminding us about how vast God's love is.

It's one of my favorite texts in all of scripture. This is how this chapter ends. It says, now to him, he was able to do immeasurably more than anything we can ask or imagine, anything more than we can ask or imagine according to the power that is at work within us.

God is immeasurably more than anything we can get our minds around than anything we can ever imagine. But here's the thing I want you to hear today. I think it's important for us as we're talking about how deep and how wide God's love for us is.

You need to understand that it covers you because it's one thing to hear and to grab hold of for God so loved the world. That's great. He does.

But I think sometimes we feel that I'm just not good enough, that the mistakes that I've made, that the things that I've done, that the skeletons in my closet, that those things from my past exclude me, that it just doesn't go that deep or that wide. That God loves the world, yes. But it's a wholly different thing for us to understand that God loves me.

And that's what it means that Paul's telling us that he's telling the church in Ephesus to be rooted in love. It means to recognize that we're planted squarely in it, no matter where we've been, no matter what we've done, no matter the mistakes that we've made in our past, no matter the wrongs that we've committed, that it's bigger than that. It doesn't make sense.

It's beyond our ability to understand. It's beyond our knowledge. To be rooted in God's love means we claim it for us.

To realize that no matter the things that I've done in my life or how far I've strayed from God, God has never once strayed from me. God's love reaches into the pig's thighs of the far-off lands where us prodigals find ourselves. And every single time it beckons us to come home.

And whenever we get the courage finally to come home, what we find every single time is a loving father running out to greet us, reminding us of just how deep and how wide God's love is. And I believe, church, firmly that until we can grasp that in our own lives, that we have no chance of being able to apply it to the lives of others. Church, it really makes me sad.

When I see people who in the name of Christianity are so angry, I think they're missing it. When in the name of Jesus, they're so angry, they're missing the fact that God loves them. They've shrunk God's love down to a size that they can grasp that their knowledge can handle and they're missing how deep and how wide God's love is.

There's a scripture that I'll use. It's in our book of worship around funerals. There's an option and I'll use it in funerals at times when I feel like it's appropriate, when there's circumstances there, when people need to be reminded of God's love and difficult and trying times.

It's from Paul as well. We've already quoted him from Ephesians and from Corinthians and this one's in Romans. As he's trying to help us to understand yet again just how deep and how wide God's love is.

And he says, for I'm convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can separate us from God through Christ Jesus our Lord. That's how deep and wide God's love is for us.

God's love is so deep and so wide that there is nowhere we can flee from his presence. That's what the psalmist writes. Where can I go from your presence? If I wake up in Sheol, there you are with me.

You're still thinking of me. That includes you, church. And that includes me.

No matter where we've been, no matter what we've done, no matter the things that we're not proud of, nothing can separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus. That's how deep and wide God's love truly is. We receive it today.

Thanks be to God. Amen.