Rooted and Grounded in Love

“...and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Verses 17-19.

We must be rooted and grounded in love in order to comprehend even a little of the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ. Christ’s love reaches deeper than the sins of the un­godly, so that from these depths it can lift the sinner up from the miry clay. It has a larger embrace than the most enlarged heart. It stretches farther than our understanding can grasp, and in height it exceeds all our knowledge; that is to say, it is beyond our comprehension.

Wisdom is the mother of beautiful love. (Sirach 24:18.) If we want to learn how to conduct ourselves in the house of God, we must seek out the laws for this walk in God’s wisdom. This wisdom begets the love of Christ, which embraces those members of the body that are seemingly “insignificant” with an irresistible attrac­tion to that which is more perfect. Love is full of hope, which is why it extinguishes all accusation and makes us patient, with all expectation. It overcomes all resistance. No power can resist it, because it gives us hope and a future. It does not seek its own, nor does it bear a grudge. Its nature is to share, and even its chastise­ment is merely a removal of everything that would hinder it from working in all its goodness.

It is not possible to comprehend the love of Christ in its fullness, but the one who is gripped by it will gain an insight into its depth, length, breadth, and height.