Love beyond knowing
Paul on his knees
Paul stops his letter to the Ephesians mid-stream and drops to his knees, and the prayer that pours out is one of the most expansive in the Bible. He prays that they would be rooted and grounded in love — the language of a tree's deep roots and a building's solid foundation, the two things that give a life stability.
And then he prays something that sounds almost like a contradiction: that they would have power to grasp the dimensions of Christ's love — its breadth and length and height and depth — and to know the love that surpasses knowledge. To know what cannot be fully known. The love of Christ is so vast that you can spend a lifetime, and then an eternity, exploring it, and never reach its edges.
This is the love at the center of everything: not a quantity we can master and move on from, but an ocean we are invited to keep wading further into, forever.
“That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know Christ's love which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to all the fullness of God.”
— Paul, praying for the Ephesians — Ephesians 3:17-19 (WEB)
Sink your roots deeper into a love you can never reach the bottom of — the inexhaustible center of the whole Christian life.
“How precious is your loving kindness, God! The children of men take refuge under the shadow of your wings.”
We treat the love of God as a beginner's lesson we have graduated from, and so we stop exploring the one thing that should anchor everything. The interior work is to recover the love of Christ as the inexhaustible center, not the kindergarten, of faith — to keep wading further into an ocean that has no edges, and to let being rooted there give your life its stability.
Take one dimension of Christ's love this week — its breadth (whom it reaches), length (how long it lasts), height, or depth (how low it stooped) — and meditate on it daily, deliberately seeking more of a love you will never exhaust.
We are tempted to treat the love of God as a beginner's lesson, something learned at conversion and left behind for weightier matters, and so our roots stay shallow and the first storm topples us. But this love is the inexhaustible center, not the kindergarten, of the faith — and a life rooted and grounded there is one no storm can uproot.
We tend to treat the love of God as a beginner's lesson — something we learned at conversion and then graduated from on our way to weightier matters. Paul prays the opposite: that mature believers, who already know they are loved, would be given power to grasp how much more there is. The love of Christ is not the kindergarten of the faith; it is its inexhaustible center.
There is no day on which you will have finally comprehended the love of Christ and can move past it. Its breadth and length and height and depth outrun every measurement. And that is not frustrating but freeing: you cannot exhaust this love, outgrow it, or reach the bottom of it. However much of it you have known, there is always more — and being rooted there is what makes a life stand.
- Do I treat God's love as a lesson I've graduated from?
- Where are my roots shallow because I stopped exploring his love?
- What dimension of Christ's love could I wade further into?
Lord, root and ground me in your love. Give me power to grasp how vast it is, and to keep wading into an ocean I can never exhaust. Amen.