The Depths of God’s Grief

Nothing quite compares to having the Joy of God pour over your soul: when you come to realize that the God of space and time and the ocean and coffee and wind and biology is sitting before you wanting your company, when God cups your face in His hands and speaks unfathomable peace and rest over you, when you’re a mess of tears and snot because He Loves You…

…And we’re only two weeks in.

Yet every time the unexplainable Presence of God enveloped me these past few days, it was paralleled by an insurmountable grief. It seemed the greater I experienced Him, the deeper the grief flowed. 

I grieved because there’s a great number of people I have met, known, and loved who have not known God in the way He wants to know them. And a greater number still of people I have not met that are yet to be transformed by His love. 

Last week, after a powerful session discussing how we know God as a Father, I asked Him to reveal to me the grief He feels for His lost children. I was soon prostrating on the dirty, cement floor with sobs racking my body. 

I was so filled with God’s selfless love and grief, and His thoughts flooded my mind; the only coherent thoughts I could express were, “What can I give? What can I give? What can I give so that they may know You? What can I sacrifice?

… I would freely give my life so that they may know You.” 

Within these past two weeks I have learned so much about how deeply God loves. If you want to be humbled and/or utterly dumbstruck, pretend to know nothing about the Gospel and allow someone to share the Good News to you. It’s utterly life-changing. 

I am never not amazed by God, and I pray that you may feel the same. 

…

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory 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 surpassed knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. ——Ephesians 3v14–19