{"id":2724,"date":"2016-02-14T15:32:23","date_gmt":"2016-02-14T20:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/prayerplainandsimple\/?p=2724"},"modified":"2016-02-14T15:32:23","modified_gmt":"2016-02-14T20:32:23","slug":"a-prayer-for-a-blessed-valentines-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/prayerplainandsimple\/2016\/02\/a-prayer-for-a-blessed-valentines-day.html","title":{"rendered":"A Prayer For A Blessed Valentine&#8217;s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center\"><em><strong>\u201cWhen I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God\u2019s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God\u2019s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.\u201d \u00a0(Ephesians 3:14-19)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a good day to pause and talk to God about his favorite subject \u2013 love. Here\u2019s a good place to begin.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2026May you have the power to understand, as all God\u2019s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is no understanding love short of a power encounter with God. C.S. Lewis\u2019s brilliant treatment, The Four Loves is a next-to-the-last-word on the subject. He claims that three of the four ancient Greek expressions of passion are natural to us, instinctive and genetically explainable:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Aros<\/em> drives romance.<\/li>\n<li><em>Storge<\/em> expresses affection for the familiar.<\/li>\n<li><em>Phileo<\/em> compels camaraderie.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All are deep and powerful desires \u2013 at times wondrous, at times tyrannical.<\/p>\n<p>Only the fourth love, <em>Agape<\/em> has no reasonable source within me, no natural survival benefit. Yet without it, my other passions morph into idols, enslaving, not fulfilling me. Only Agape looks beyond, to another\u2019s interest. It is selfless choice \u2013 \u201cFighting for the highest possible good in another\u201d and without personal benefit to me. <em>Agape<\/em> is either a miracle, or it is nothing at all. Yet without it, my natural love ceases to fulfill its purpose, corrupting me with distorted obsession.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why Paul the Apostle models the prayer above. He is pleading for divine insight to know the full scope of God\u2019s <em>agape<\/em>: \u201chow wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.\u201d Do you notice anything strange about this description? Paul includes four, not three dimensions \u2013 wide, long, high, and deep. That fourth perspective \u2013 seeing the depth \u2013 is what takes the miracle. And miracles seem to take prayer. Which circles me back to my focus this month.<\/p>\n<p>And so today I pray to know and understand the depth of God\u2019s love which has no human correlation. Without it, I can\u2019t be truly human. Yet I can\u2019t know it from any human source. I need God to love me in order to know and then express it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reflection<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now would be a good time to pause and talk to God about his favorite subject \u2013 love.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Response<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I pour over Ephesians 3:14-19. I let it pour over me. Believers have been borrowing these words and sending them to God for 2000 years. They are perfect precedent. I follow suit. Then, as John writes (I John 3:1), I will \u201cSee how great a love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God. And that is what we are.\u201d When I ask to understand, and wait for the miracle, Love Himself appears.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWhen I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":478,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A Prayer For A Blessed Valentine&#039;s Day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/prayerplainandsimple\/2016\/02\/a-prayer-for-a-blessed-valentines-day.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Prayer For A Blessed Valentine&#039;s Day\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cWhen I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. 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