Praying This Bible Verse Transformed My Experience Of God's Love
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Photo by Daniil Silantev on Unsplash
Do you know God loves you but struggle to feel it?
I can relate.
I remember driving home from church one dark winter night in my twenties, my heart troubled by my lack of experience of God’s love on an emotional level. I knew God loved me, but sometimes, inside, I felt as cold as the shimmering snowbanks flying by my car. I longed to actually feel, warmly and deeply, God’s love.
At some point on my journey, it occurred to me to start asking God to help me feel His love more. Eventually, I started praying one of my favorite passages about God’s love over myself—the apostle Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians found in Ephesians 3:17-19 (TLB):
“I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.”
The beauty of praying Scripture is that, because we are praying God’s expressed will, we know that His answer is YES. We know He wants us to feel His love because He told us He does. So, when we pray to feel more of it, we can rest knowing that in time we surely will.
I am happy to say that I have experienced this truth in my own life. God has been faithful to answer my prayer in a myriad of ways. Though I always long to experience more and more of Him, I feel His love much more deeply now in my thirties than I did in my twenties, and I believe praying Ephesians 3:17-19 has been a key part of that transformation.
While God will never love us any more or any less than He already does, our ability to experience and feel His love can and does change. If you want to feel more of God’s love, I encourage you to start praying Ephesians 3:17-19.
I’ve re-written the verse for you below in the form of a prayer, changing everywhere it says “you” or “your” to “I” or “my.” (I love praying Scripture this way because it really personalizes it.)
As women of purpose, our ultimate purpose is to love God and be loved by Him. Everything we do is meant to flow out of this mutual love relationship. My prayer is that as you pray this prayer, you will experience God’s love in new, unexpected, and heart-warming ways.
A prayer to feel more of God’s love:
Dear God,
I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in my heart, living within me as I trust in him. May my roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may I be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for myself, though it is so great that I will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last I will be filled up with God himself.
In Jesus’ name, amen.
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts, prayer request, or questions!
In love, purpose, and faith,
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