“Love is layered throughout this passage and the dominate theme. But none of our core samples of love are the same. In fact, this prayer passage itself suggests God’s diversity. The further away from the center of God’s fullness, the love textures become more dimensioned with reason and truth. They all have love in them but the closer we get to God’s fullness, the more dense is the love surrounding ‘fullness’.”
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, … … …
That you, being rooted and grounded in love,
May have strength to comprehend with all the saints
What is the breadth, and length and height and depth,
And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
That you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Our faith is based upon our knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ and our relationship with Him as a person. A regenerated believer, one who has been born again, knows what it means to have new life. It is easy to identify by our experience of faith when Jesus Christ came into our life. But this new birth is an embryo of life in Christ. It begins a gestation period introducing us into grace accessible by faith. Being born again is receiving Jesus factually! We literally receive the resurrected life of the person, Jesus Christ. How is this possible? … Love! What has love to do with it? ☺
In human terms it is ridiculously absurd. This reality contradicts natural laws and our sense of what is possible. The colossal nature of what God has done is a measurement of how gargantuan our God of love is! The regenerate person has within “self” a witness and testimony of the saving power of Jesus Christ as well as God’s immense love which drives grace. Paul says it best in Romans 5, it is so “much more!”
The life of Jesus within each believer is an imperishable, eternal seed requiring divine nurturing. The Holy Spirit has eternally sealed and anointed us into the eternal family of God. We have been joined into God through Jesus and guaranteed access to treasures in Jesus Himself. It is a package deal, including our own personal mentor. John states it well in his first epistle, “as He (Jesus) is, so are we in this world,” 1John 4:17c.
Yet, at the same time, the response of our will is required. Our relationship is consummated by response of our will, drawing us deeper into God’s relationship of divine grace. Grace becomes a relationship for the believer! If we neglect the fellowship of our grace relationship, neglect the mentoring of our Holy Spirit, He faithfully continues knocking at our heart’s door seeking our love’s response … until He decides to physically move us out from this temporal journey to our eternal home, giving us a new body like His. This is when our responses to His love and grace are measured for eternal loss or gain. Pray we have more “gain” than “loss!”
These scriptural conditions are foundational to being rooted and grounded in love. Paul is affirming this vital relationship of grace to those who were instructed by Paul himself for three years.
Paul is providing two images of new life in Christ. They are being painted on God’s love canvas. The first image, being rooted, portrays an organic relationship in life. Something rooted extracts nutrients in its earth, processing them into the life bearing purpose of the plant. The tree or plant’s ability to bloom and produce seed is conditioned by its soil. The purpose of the plant is to produce glory, fruit and seed, John 15:1cf. Our soil includes the scripture which declares God’s truth.
The second image Paul gives us is being grounded. Here we have reference to structure or a building built on a foundation. The deeper in the earth the foundation is poured the higher the structure can be built. The better tensile strength of the framework, the more flexible can be the design. These objective characteristics define the character, quality and function of the structure. The purpose of grounding is to define our foundation and identify materials used in our structure. The resurrected person of Jesus Christ is our foundation. Righteousness, truth and holiness are spiritual materials glorifying the designer and builder upon whom our structure is built. These spiritual materials are sourced in the truth declared by God in His word expressed in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
In temporal terms, these two images are separated by function, one is organic the other is not. But these two images are given on behalf
of the same thing, God’s agape (αγαπη) love. In fact, these two separate functions are blended together into singular divine harmony. God is both righteous and life giving blended into oneness.
God can seem contradictory within temporal references. We eluded to this in our last GN speaking to “the strength to comprehend” God’s love. There is a physical strength associated with the capacity to contain God’s love. To the point, Peter combines both of these images by talking about us as being living stones, 1Peter 2:4-8.
Our ability to grasp this mystery falls outside our created boundaries. But, in Christ, we have within ourselves the evidence by knowing what is not knowable. We are able, in Christ, to receive grace divinely sourced and acquire spiritual discernment, Hebrews 5:14.
Our phrase, “That you, being rooted and grounded in love,” is intended to convey in the Greek that we already have been rooted and grounded. That is, we have been given a capacity to grow (2Peter 3:18) in knowledge of Christ Jesus (2Corinthians 5:17). It is a capacity drawing us into eternity even while we continue to wear mortal flesh, limited as it is, to temporal barriers. It is part of what it means to be “in Christ Jesus” while, at the same time, “Christ is in us” (Colossians 1:27) while continuing to wear mortality. It is why Paul prays, “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through your spirit in the inner man so that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith …. That you, being rooted and grounded in love, … (Ephesians 3:16-17).
Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith lies at the foundation of being filled with the fullness of God. This spiritual union with God through the sacrifice of Jesus is also pictured in Ephesians through the union of a man and a woman Eph. 5:22cf. The rooting and grounding in this physical union is a picture type of Christ’s union with us in His body which is the church. It is one of the realities where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Being created in His image is an indicator of His plan and purpose. Created in His image is a human prologue of life leading to the resurrected life of Jesus being in us. We were created or elected to be vessels to contain God, 2Tim. 2:20cf, Rom. 9:21cf.
The combining together of rooting and grounding, as in living stones, is also pictured in the coming together of a man and a woman. Male man was created with the propensity to bring the design elements to life. He has a bias to reason and objective analyses. Since it is the male man filling our pulpits, we are predisposed to hear lessons and sermons structured for objective understanding.
The woman, on the other hand, was created to complete a man and is naturally inclined toward relationships and organically enhancing life issues. The woman, typically, has much greater capacities in life and needs to lead from behind teaching the meaning of love.
God’s plan of creation and life compliments truths in scripture, i.e., “that you, being rooted and grounded in love.” They are intimately symmetrical within the larger truth picture scripture unfolds. The life God produces in us is greater than the sum of rooting and grounding both of which are essential as is our will of faith. What love, bringing us together in the person of Jesus by grace through faith!!
We conclude this segment with the words from The Love of God by Frederick Lehman.
“The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell.
The guilty pair, bowed down with care God gave His Son to win
His erring child He reconciled and pardoned from his sin.
Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.
O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints’ and angels’ song.”