The hymn we consider this morning was written by the great hymn writer, Isaac Watts—we will no doubt have more hymns written by him through our study.
But his hymn that we are looking at this morning reminds us in its title that
“The Love of God Shed Abroad in the Heart”
1 Come, gracious Lord, descend and dwell
By faith and love in every breast;
Then shall we know and taste and feel
The joys that cannot be expressed.
2 Come, fill our hearts with inward strength,
Make our enlargèd souls possess
And learn the height and breadth and length
Of thine immeasurable grace.
3 Now to the God whose power can do
More than our thoughts or wishes know,
Be everlasting honours done
By all the church, through Christ his Son.
As we read this hymn it is good to remember that God can fill our hearts and our souls.
We live in a world that you can know anything at any moment. I was watching Jimmy Kimble a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about going on a trip without his cell phone. He asked: “How can I know anything!”
Campus Life magazine once said that:
Knowledge is exploding at such a rate–more than 2000 pages a minute–that even Einstein couldn’t keep up. In fact, if you read 24 hours a day, from age 21 to 70, and retained all you read, you would be one and a half million years behind when you finished.
But let us look at the Bible passage attached to this hymn, which is Ephesians 3:19:
19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph 3:19 ESV)
We must remember that the love of Christ surpasses our knowledge of anything we could gain on Earth.
The first verse of this hymns says:
“Come, gracious Lord, descend and dwell
By faith and love in every breast;
Then shall we know and taste and feel
The joys that cannot be expressed.”
Our scientific world cannot understand faith without seeing. But we pray that our knowledge comes from him—that he will increase our faith, so that we know the unknowable. In turn, only through Christ can we taste and feel the complexities of God.
The second verse says:
“Come, fill our hearts with inward strength,
Make our enlargèd souls possess
And learn the height and breadth and length
Of thine immeasurable grace.”
Do you pray to have an enlarged soul or an enlarged mind?
We do not talk about “the soul” very much. It is interesting that in our enlightened society, we do not have a true understanding of this term.
The Oxford dictionary states that The soul is “a person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity.”
Dictionary.com states that the soul is “the spiritual part of humans regarded in its moral aspect, or as believed to survive death and be subject to happiness or misery in a life to come”.
We are not really clear what exactly the soul is.
The Holman dictionary briefly states that the soul is “the vital existence of a human being.”
Basically, while we can dig deep in to the definition of the soul. I believe that the soul is that which connects to God.
Let me tell you this—if you seek to have an enlarged soul—then you will possess the motivation to learn all that you need to learn to be all that God created you to be. As we lead Soldiers, the most important attribute of the leader is the soul. It is the soul where the motivation comes from–it is from that soul that one stays up night preparing for the next day—it is from the heart that one takes a step back and considers the right thing to do in any given situation.
We look back Ephesians 3:19 and see that it is “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”. If you have a choice between knowledge and the love of Christ—choose the love of Christ.
There is no way you are going to be able to know everything. It changes and evolves constantly. But the love of Christ surpasses knowledge.
It is from the soul—that you will “learn the height and breadth and length of (his) immeasurable grace.”
The third verse concludes with:
“Now to the God whose power can do
More than our thoughts or wishes know,
Be everlasting honours done
By all the church, through Christ his Son.”
When we trust in ourselves and our science, we miss this truth of what God can do.
We talk much about what we need to do. We talk much about us doing more—and I’m the worst, but we forget what God can do—when we trust in Him.
He can do much more than our thought or our wishes can even fathom. We just simply must trust in him.
I was reminded about the movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”—my favorite of the series. There is a part of the movie where Indiana must cross a deep canyon in order to get the grail to bring the water back to heal his father.
When he approached the canyon, he reads his book. Then he closes his eyes and takes a step.
We must go about a do our study. We must do the heavy lifting to learn the lessons that we need to learn. I believe God gives us people and in our case instructors to guide us to make those decisions—but there comes a time when we must simply trust.
So as we go about our day.
Study, yes.
Learn, yes.
Ponder, solve, strategize—yes, yes, yes!
That is what God has brought you here to do.
But never forget to turst Christ with all of your heart in everything.
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