All You Need Is Love
KATIA ADAMS • June 11, 2018
This last month I was one of the millions of people who sat and watched as Prince Harry wed Meghan Markle. I love weddings in general, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint with all the pomp and ceremony and glamour, not to mention the incredible promises of covenant to one another.
I’ve been intrigued by the social media frenzy stirred up by Bishop Michael Curry’s passionate preaching. Voices of admiration rang out almost as loudly as some in the Christian camp booing him for not giving a full enough rendition of sin and its penalty. Whilst I can understand where some are coming from, I’ve got to say I thought his message was timely, beautiful and profound. As I understand from scripture, God is love – and so I’m not convinced that we can ever overemphasise the incredible world-transforming nature of it.
Listening to him preach and reading over some of what’s been commented has led me to scripture again to look at love. I’ve been musing over Paul’s words in Ephesians 3 and am more convinced than ever that God’s heart for the world and for His people is to be totally and utterly overwhelmed and immersed in His love.
Here’s Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 –
14 For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (NKJV)
A few thoughts on these verses:
Let love be your foundation
Our roots are in love – that’s where everything starts in our journey with Jesus. Sometimes I think we’ve tried to rewrite the Gospel so that God’s motivation toward us becomes more sin and judgement focussed, but the best-known verse in the world remains true in direct opposition to this sort of thinking – it was because God so LOVED the world that He gave His son. Let’s not muddy the waters by trying to get theologically clever. Let’s be clear – the Gospel story is rooted in one emotion and Paul’s prayer springboards from that place of rooting and grounding: Love. It’s not a flimsy fickle sort of love. It’s not a here today, gone tomorrow kind of love. It’s a world-transforming, cross-bearing, death-defying sort of love. And it’s on offer to you and me.
Let love be your comprehension
Starting in love, Paul prays that we would be able to comprehend it. That our minds will be stretched to understanding the incredible proportions of it. That our thinking would be inundated with this emotion from the heart of the Father. The gospel has you rooted in love, now let’s journey in understanding it, in filling our minds with the truth of it, in trying to grasp the extent of love that our Papa has for us. It’s a study that is so vast that it blows our minds (and boxes of thinking) wide open.
Let love be your experience
Paul’s words are provoking because though he prays that we comprehend the love of God in verse 18, he’s clear in verse 19 that it goes beyond comprehension. No matter how much we study and learn about the love of God it will never be enough because it is so much greater than our minds can fathom. Comprehending His love is a worthy and important pursuit, but it’s an insufficient one. God wants to journey us so that the love that we start in and work to understand is a love that we enter into an experience of. He wants to take us from being merely students to the wonderful privilege of being sons – the first focusses on learning, the second on relational experience.
Where are you in your journey with Jesus? You may be someone who is trying to grapple with the idea of whether God really cares about you, or you may be just starting out on getting to know Jesus and are getting your feet planted firmly into His awesome love. Wherever you are, let me encourage you today – His love is so beautiful to read about and think about, but was never intended to be just a theological concept. He is inviting us to experience Him and His heart, to meet His affection which is beyond any box we’ll ever be able to hold in our minds, so vast that it is breath-taking in wonder and depth.
Let’s step in a little deeper today and invite Him to come and do what He has always intended – to show off with His love so that we come face to face with His affection and are undone in His presence once again.
If you want to grow in the prophetic, it doesn’t begin with what you say. It begins with what you see. The prophetic is rooted in perception. Not just natural insight, but spiritual awareness—what Scripture calls “the eyes of your heart.” Paul prayed that the church in Ephesus would have their hearts enlightened so they could truly see what God was doing. “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you…” (Ephesians 1:18) God isn’t distant or withholding. But if we’re going to hear Him clearly, we have to see differently. We need Heaven’s perspective. And that means learning to quiet the noise, tune into His voice, and let Him train our inner vision. You don’t need to wait for a dramatic vision or audible voice. Often, God speaks through a nudge. A mental picture. A scripture that lingers. A sense of burden or joy that feels holy. These are the first signs that your spiritual eyesight is awakening. But it takes time. It takes attention. It takes trust. Just like physical muscles grow with use, your spiritual senses grow as you spend time with Him—not just talking, but listening. Not just asking for answers, but asking for His perspective. You were never meant to live according to what the world says is true. You were meant to live by every word that flows from the mouth of God. A Prayer for This Week: “Lord, open the eyes of my heart. Teach me to see what You see—not just in others, but in myself, in my circumstances, in the world around me. Give me clarity and confidence to trust Your perspective more than my own. Amen.” This week, pay attention to what you notice. The way you see is often the way He speaks.
In this live session, Sean Smith and Julian Adams share their prophetic perspectives on 2025, offering honest reflections on what they sense God is doing across the earth. With hope and expectancy, they discuss the spiritual landscape ahead and how we can prepare for what’s to come.
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