Articles
In View of What Lies Beyond
We live in a world of limitations. Our houses are only so many feet wide and long. Automobile gas tanks hold a specific number of gallons. Our bodies grow to a certain height, then stop.
There are those who find limitations confining. In the days of the American frontier Daniel Boone, it is said, would begin getting uncomfortable as civilization spread in his direction, and he would pull of stakes and head west, looking for “elbow room.”
In the spiritual realm we do not find the cramped limitations so characteristic of our physical world. Writing to the Ephesians, Paul stretches our minds when he prays “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 surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Paul goes on to say that God “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Ephesians 3:17-20).
One summer our family visited a fish hatchery in Missouri and saw hundreds of trout swimming in vats about six feet wide and 40 feet long. Later many of them would be released into lakes where they could swim free for great distances.
God is fitting us for a world far grander than this. As Paul says, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:20).
Until the time comes for us to leave this world with all its limitations, let’s be preparing ourselves to enter the vast expanses of the heavenly kingdom. Great as we imagine it to be, it’s far greater than that!
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
