Wrapped in the Love

I’m wondering if God’s trying to tell me something. I noticed it first a couple of days ago. I’ve been working my way through the non-Pauline epistles (all the letters written by people other than Paul in the New Testament), and the other day, I hit Jude. It’s a short letter, just one chapter long, and it’s a rallying cry to battle apostasy.

I’m wondering if God’s trying to tell me something. I noticed it first a couple of days ago. I’ve been working my way through the non-Pauline epistles (all the letters written by people other than Paul in the New Testament), and the other day, I hit Jude. It’s a short letter, just one chapter long, and it’s a rallying cry to battle apostasy.

I began reading, ready for the call to arms, but was stopped short by opening. Right off the bat, in verse 1, Jude says he’s writing “to those who are called, wrapped in the love of God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ.” (NET) Wrapped in the love of God? Wow. Another version says it “to all who are called to live in the love of God the Father and the care of Jesus Christ.” (NLT). It was just so. . .tender.

I mean, I know God loves us. I just sometimes forget that God loves us. Sometimes I relegate it to some dry theological list: God’s Sovereignty, God’s Omnipresence, God’s Love…as if the fact that God chose to love us makes that love somehow less tender, just an obligation. Yes, God chose to love us as an act of His will. But how ridiculous for me think that this choice would lessen the love (just talk to an adoptive parent to see how flawed that thinking is.) 

And it’s not just the New Testament either. Sometimes we find it easier to believe that Jesus likes humans than to think that the Father would. And by weirdly separating their love, we sterilize God’s love for His people in the Old Testament. But check out Zephaniah 3:18, where through His prophet, God tells Israel, “The Lord your God is in your midst; he is a warrior who can deliver. He takes great delight in you; he renews you by his love; he shouts for joy over you,” (NET). The NIV renders it, “The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” Delight. Love. Rejoice. Hardly clinical, hardly dry.

Maybe it’s because I need to be reminded of this that Ephesians 3:18-19 gets to me (and so many of us) every time. Paul tells the believers at Ephesus that he prays that “you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God,” (NET).

I want to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, that won’t fit in a theological dictionary, that fills us to all the fullness of God. I want to live there, wrapped in the love of the Father and living in the care of Jesus Christ. So I pray that you and I will know and comprehend and remember and lean on how wide and long and high and deep God’s love for us really is.