How Many and How Great Are The Gifts of God To Us

By Fr. Christopher Foeckler, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

How many and how great are the gifts of God to us! How many reasons we have to be grateful to God and rejoice in His goodness to us and to the whole human race! In fact, we have reason to rejoice for each and every person to whom Our God offers His love and mercy in the Person of His only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord!

We all have difficulties in our lives, and many have severe ones, but all the more reason to hear, believe, and abide in the message of hope and love that the Father has sent us in His Son. Here is just one example of that message from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:

“I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph. 3:14–19)

Paul’s enigmatic phrase describing the extent of the love of Christ—“the length and breadth, height and depth”—may refer, as commentators suggest, to the Cross of Christ, where the Mystery of God’s unimaginable love that surpasses all understanding is revealed through the work of redemption, embracing the length of the whole world and everyone in its breadth, as well as reaching down to the depths of the nether world and up to the heights of heaven to open the way for all people—past, present, and future—to know the merciful love of God!

The gift we have been given to know of it and to be filled with the fullness and power of this mystery of love requires us, on our part, to strive to abide in it, to dwell in it, and to remain in it by striving in all we do to seek what God wills of us. What God wants us to do above all is to love Him with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

For this, we give thanks and praise always and everywhere to the Lord, whose love is unsurpassable and ineffable in its “length and breadth, height and depth.”

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers and supporters!