Knowing Love

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s 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—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:17b-19).

What roots and establishes us in love? As was said yesterday, it is Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith by the gift and power of the Spirit. This is our rooting and establishing in love. It is Christ’s love that grounds us, embeds us firmly in the soil of God’s reality, enabling us to grow.

Established in the love of Christ, the journey of our lives now follows the trajectory of Paul’s prayer: discovering more deeply what God has already given, namely, this love of Christ. This discovery is empowered only by the Triune God in the context of the Christian community.

At times it is said, in rather trite ways, that it’s all about love. Just love. Yet, trite though it may seem—it is also true. The love of God in Christ is everything. 

Discipleship is a work of discovering this love more fully. It is a work of knowing Christ’s love. Knowing not in a head-knowledge sort of way. Paul askes that we know the love of Christ in an intimate sort of way—the kind of knowing that comes through an unconditionally loving, committed, long-term relationship, like a good marriage. The task of Christian discipleship is to tangibly experience Christ’s 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. 

Of course, our knowing this love doesn’t come only from our experience of relationship with Christ. It comes also through the “manifold wisdom of God” that places us in a church—a church full of diverse, divided, disagreeable folks—people from all walks of life, all different ethnicities, all different personalities, all different opinions, and social classes.

To fully grasp the width, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love—we must know that he also loves all these people; forgives them; is committed to them and gives his gifts also to them. Even though we may not see how to be reconciled with some of these gangly Christians—we must confront the fact that they too are rooted and established in Christ’s love. We must confront the fact that they too have been reconciled to God and to us in the church!

There are no longer any dividing walls that separate us, for Jesus removed them all in his cross.  To grasp the expansive love of Christ, we must face the reality of Christ’s love for those Christians we deem unlovable. This recognition demands of us a deepening 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. He asks that we might know something that is ultimately unknowable, or at least ungraspable by us finite human creatures. Yet 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.

For that, we need this doxology:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:17-21).