SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

One hundred seventy-five years ago the USS Vincennes left Norfolk, Virginia on a voyage of discovery. She covered 87,000 miles of ocean. Her Commander, Charles Wilkes and his crew, using 28 precision chronometers, charted 280 Pacific islands and confirmed the existence of Antarctica. The crew of the Vincennes was gone 4 years. A similar voyage today would take a manned craft to Mars and back. Yet such a voyage was taken by intrepid Americans. Less than four decades earlier Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery left St. Louis on an equally daring journey. I am old enough to remember holding my breath as Neil Armstrong took his giant leap onto a lunar surface we knew little about. At 7 years old, I was worried that he’d sink right down. I don’t think I’ll ever see anything as thrilling as those grainy shots of Neil and Buzz bouncing around in their space suits, with Walter Cronkite explaining everything. When one remembers that the laptop upon which I am typing has more computing power than that available to Mission Control in 1969, one gets an ever greater appreciation of their achievement, and the sheer bravery every man and  woman involved demonstrated to accomplish the first Moon landing.

            These thoughts lead one to consider the Vikings who left Europe, sailed uncharted seas, and populated Iceland, for a time Greenland, and even, for a time, North America. And then there are those Pacific mariners who, in prehistoric time paddled primitive dugouts or rafts to Australia, New Zeeland, and a thousand small islands without benefit of GPS, compass, or sextant.

            I don’t know of any modern examples that compare. We aren’t shipping out to parts unknown anymore. No one is planning to build the Starship Enterprise. Watching the reruns of the original Star Trek television series the notion that we’d send a crew out on an open-ended mission “To boldly go where no man has gone before” seems even more dated than those clunky sliding doors, or Lieutenant Ohura’s bouffant.

            Our voyages of discovery are taken by computers, telescopes, microscopes, super-colliders, and unmanned crafts -which is another way of saying that they are taken by proxy.

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father…..that He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith – that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3.14-19 ESV

            Paul prays for an amazing thing – that we “may be filled with all the fullness of God.” He seems to say in Colossians 2.9 that only Jesus can contain such fullness, so it is amazing he prays for the same fullness for us.  This can happen if we “know” (this is a Biblical word loaded with meaning) the love of Christ. To acquire this knowledge will require a voyage of discovery. We need to chart the “breadth, and length, and height, and depth” of that love (four dimensions?).  To make this journey we will need strength (v.18). To make this journey we will need Divine assistance (vv. 16-17). But the voyage is ours, we are the ones who must discover, who must comprehend.

 

            Do we consider how large a sea we are asked to chart?  Have we ever prayed a similar prayer: “Lord, help me understand your love better”?  Do we ever think, ponder, treasure things in our hearts like Mary, count our blessings, stop and know that He is God?  Do we let others – devotional writers, television preachers, even friends tell us about God’s love without doing the reading, the praying, the serving it takes to experience it ourselves. Do we really believe we can discover it by proxy?

            The love of God expressed to us in Jesus Christ is too large a sea to know second hand.  We can only know it first hand, and only with His help. Alone we would be exploring the Pacific in a canoe with a broken paddle. It is too large a sea.

 

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