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And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord\u2019s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge\u2014that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17b-19)

What roots and establishes us in love? \xa0If you recall from yesterday, it is the phrase that comes just before: Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith by the gift and power of the Spirit. \xa0This is our rooting and establishing in love. \xa0It is Christ\u2019s love that grounds us, embeds us firmly in the soil of reality, and enables us to grow. \xa0

Having been so established in the love of Christ, the journey of our lives now follows the trajectory of Paul\u2019s prayer: discovering more deeply what God has already given, namely, this love of Christ. \xa0Interestingly enough, it is a work that we can only do through the power of the Triune God and the work of the Christian community.

It can be said at times, in rather trite ways, that it\u2019s all about love. \xa0Just love. \xa0Yet, trite though it may seem\u2014it is also true. \xa0The love of God in Christ is everything. \xa0

Discipleship is a work of discovering this love more fully. \xa0It is a work of knowing Christ\u2019s love. \xa0Knowing not in a head-knowledge sort of way, but more in the way of the Hebrew understanding of the term. \xa0Paul is asking that we might know the love of Christ in an intimate sort of way\u2014the kind of knowing that comes through an unconditionally loving, committed, long-term relationship, like a really good marriage. \xa0The work of discipleship across our Christian lives is to tangibly experience Christ\u2019s way of keeping this relationship of love with us, through things like his forgiveness for our failures, his commitment to us despite our foibles, his bearing with us in all situations, and his limitless gifts. \xa0

But of course, our knowing of this love doesn\u2019t only come from our own experience of the relationship with Christ. \xa0It comes also through the \u201cmanifold wisdom of God\u201d that places us in a church\u2014a church full of diverse, divided, disagreeable folks\u2014people from all walks of life, all different ethnicities, all different personalities, all different opinions, and social classes. \xa0To really capture this idea, you have to picture the most abhorrent caricature of a Christian person that you have ever experienced or heard of. \xa0 \xa0

To fully grasp the width, length, height, and depth of Christ\u2019s love\u2014we have to know that he also loves these people. \xa0Forgives them. \xa0Is committed to them and gives his gifts also to them. \xa0Even though we may not see how to be reconciled with these strangers who we are told are fellow Christians\u2014we must confront the fact that they too are rooted and established in Christ\u2019s love. \xa0We must confront the fact that they too have been reconciled to God and to us in the church! \xa0There are no longer any dividing walls that separate us for Jesus removed them all in his cross. \xa0In order to grasp the expansive love of Christ, we must confront this reality of Christ\u2019s love for those Christians we deem unlovable. \xa0This recognition demands of us an ever deeper conversion to Christ: an ever deeper knowing of his infinitely expansive, unconditional agape love.

Paul leaves us with a paradox here: he prays for a knowledge that surpasses knowledge. \xa0He asks that we might know something that is ultimately unknowable, or at least ungraspable by us finite human creatures here and now. \xa0Yet in this journey of seeking to know the love of Christ that holds us and the church, the fullness of God slowly fills us up as we discover how truly established and enfolded in love we really are.\xa0

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