The audio for this devotional is not available for now, but you can have your device read it to you.
Reading options
Verse:And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. —Ephesians 3:18, NLT
Our neighbor, Richard, has been renovating a home in our neighborhood ever since purchasing it and recently invited my husband, Carl, and me to stop by to see his progress. We stepped into a lovely house —large, spacious, and elegant with fascinating custom details, unique fixtures, elegant trimmings, and exotic touches.
The kitchen was a chef’s dream; the bathroom floors were heated; the bedroom was outfitted with gorgeous French doors that framed a perfect lake view.
The house was a work of art. However, the reason claimed my attention: the house was a labor of love —Richard’s best effort to create a dream home for his wife of forty years. For the past eighteen months, his singular agenda has been to fulfill to the smallest detail whatever it was that his wife preferred or specified, no matter how minute or time-consuming. He had stripped and stained the wooden floor in one hallway three times before getting the shade just right. Why? “Because I wanted it to be exactly what she wanted.” His face reflected not the slightest trace of resentment or impatience, only love and joy. That’s when my mind turned to the sanctuary.
Though I have studied it many times throughout my life, I was once again reading the many minute instructions found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
If I were honest, in the past, it has always seemed to me that God was being incredibly picky and rule-oriented and that no detail was too small for Him not to legislate. However, it had begun to occur to me that maybe the sanctuary provides a tiny glimpse into a mind so great, so omniscient and omnipresent, that there isn’t even the slightest detail of a microbe that can escape His thoughts, attention, and planning.
After visiting Richard’s house, though, I realized something more than God’s infinite mind at work. Not unlike Richard’s attention to every detail in the house because he loves and wants to please his wife and give her the very best, the detailed nature of the sanctuary is an outgrowth of God planning every facet of how to redeem us because of His eternal love for us. The many minute instructions related to the sanctuary provide just a tiny window for us to understand “how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is”! (Ephesians 3:18, NLT).
Rachel Williams-Smith