Ephesians 3:17-18  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ¹⁸ may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,

The Lord of the Rings is a marvelous trilogy.  In the 1st book, The Fellowship of the Ring, there is a scene where the group encounters the stone entry doors into the ancient land of Moria.  They must enter and get through this vast dwelling place of the dwarves under the Misty Mountains in order to continue their journey.  But in order to get the stone doors to open, they have to figure out a subtle riddle that is inscribed on the doors,  “The doors of Durin, Lord of Moria, speak friend and enter.”

Gandalf spends quite a bit of time speaking every password that he can think of.  Finally, Frodo comes up with the answer:  Mellon, the elvish word for ‘friend’.  It was there right in
front of them.  Gandalf speaks “Mellon” and the stone doors open in the nick of time and they enter this underground world.  Their reality was that they couldn’t enter in until they came up with the key to open the door.

This morning I woke up thinking about Jesus.  I was aware of how everything that we do is about Him.  But more than that is the awareness of His love and sacrifice for me.  Earlier I have written about Donna’s experience when God gave her a vision of Jesus on the cross:

“As she looked on, she noticed blood dripping from His hands.  Suddenly it was personally real to her that Jesus had died for her! She began to weep and couldn’t stop as she realized that Jesus had loved her enough to die for her, not just “the world” but her, personally.”

Jesus is right in front of us.  He is the way we enter in, when we through faith allow Him to enter into us.  How often are we like Gandalf, trying to think of some way in – when the answer is right before us?  When we embrace Jesus, we enter and experience first hand His incredible love for us.

One of my favorite stories is told of Dr. Karl Barth.  He was considered by many scholars to be one of the most brilliant theologians of the 20th Century.  Once when he was lecturing at Princeton Theological Seminary, a student asked him what was the greatest truth he had ever learned. Dr. Barth thought for a moment and then said: “The greatest truth that I have ever learned was at my mother’s knee, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”

It sounds so simple yet it unlocks the most incredible door to love vast as the ocean.  Such is the love of Christ!