I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. (Ephesians 3:17-18, NIV)
You will find ecstatic joy and deep depression, faith and doubt, peace and raging anger in the psalms. John Calvin once said the psalms are “an anatomy of the soul.” Everything a human soul can experience is found in this book of poetry.
Like music, poetry expands the capacity of the heart. But with the exception of Hallmark™ cards, we don’t engage much with poetry today. Instead we have prose. The word prose gives rise to our word prosaic, which means: Lacking poetic beauty, unromantic, commonplace, dull. So if your wife says, “Honey, you are so prosaic,” that’s not a good thing.
Some of us are very prosaic—we live in the world of sports, contracts, and bottom lines. We have highly developed minds, athletic bodies, and often underdeveloped souls. Some of us are not sure how to love, how to be happy or angry, or how to grieve. We don’t really know how to handle “the feeling thing.” You would like to feel more than you do, but you’re not sure how.
Paul prays that Christian believers would be “rooted” in Christ’s love (3:17). The problem is one of capacity. Knowing the love of Christ is like pouring an ocean into a thimble. We only know a little because we can only contain a little, and that means we can only give a little.
The great question is, “How can I receive more of God’s love and then channel that love to those God has placed around me?” The psalms are the place to begin. More than any other part of Scripture, the psalms will expand the capacity of your heart.
How do you handle “the feeling thing”?
