The Deep Love of Jesus

Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and I love hymns that express the love of Jesus because it describes so well, (all of them do), the love of Christ. It’s a wonderful thing to express your love for your Savior, whether with hymns or with scripture or with your own words when you are praying. “Oh Jesus, I love You, I love You!”  We can say it all the time, and it’s good when our love for the Lord overflows with words of adoration or a song of adoration. I’ll often find myself singing,

Oh, the deep, deep love of Jesus.
Vast unmeasured, boundless free
Rolling as a mighty ocean
In its fullness over me.

Or something like that, but you know what, even when we sing our adoration to Christ, we can so easily deceive ourselves unless our adoration for Him is proved. And most often, it’s proved through a test because genuine love will always say, “I love you so much and, here, let me prove it.” Obedience is not so much for God’s sake, mostly it’s for our sake. God already knows how deep our love is for Him, but the point is He wants us to realize the depth of our love for Him.

And so He tests us. Psalm 66 describes it this way, “… For you, O God, tested us; You refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. But praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld His love from me.” There you’ve got it. God is the one who brings us “into prisons” (and I’m saying this sitting in a wheelchair) or “lays burdens on our backs” (and I say this as I deal with chronic pain). But all the while He never “withholds His love from us.” His love drives Him to test us in order to refine us like silver, to prove our love for Him.

But here’s a good question: Why does Psalm 66 use silver as a description for that refining process? Well, when gold is put through a refinement, it involves heat, like in a furnace. But when silver is refined, it involves pressure, as when you crush a metal in a crucible. When a test heats up you want to escape, right? But when a trial is pressuring you, you want to cave in and collapse. Oh, but if we would but hold on and remain faithful, and rigorously obey, our faith becomes refined. Obedience melts away pride and bitterness. Obedience crushes into dust all your self-centeredness and reveals a heart, pure and at peace.

Proverbs 17 says, “The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart.” You know,when I look back on those early days in the hospital, man, I felt as though I were being crushed in the crucible. God was grinding my heart into powder, pressuring me from every side. But as I look back, I praise God for His wisdom. He gave me sustaining grace through the hardest of times. And now so many years later, my faith is not only stronger for it, but I can sing and sing from the heart.

One more verse about silver: Proverbs 27 says, “The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but man is tested by the praise he receives.” So what do you say to people after they tell you how amazed they are that you’ve endured such a hard test? Just point them back to Jesus and His grace that has sustained you in that crucible. And He did it to prove your love to Him and friend, that’s something you can sing about. When you have a chance today, drop by joniandfriends.org.

Music: How Deep the Father’s Love for Us by Stuart Townend, © 1995 Thankyou Music

© Joni and Friends