“That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17-19). It is clear that the love of God and the knowledge of God and the entire being of God are tied up together. After all, in his gospel, John calls God the Word, and in his epistles, John calls God Love. And it makes sense. If we love God, then we keep His commandments. If we are to know God, then we must do His will. Love and knowledge are all bound up together and really two aspects of the same thing. This is what makes Paul’s plea that we be rooted and grounded in God's love so important. If Christ dwells in our heart then we can be grounded in His love. Sometimes feelings of love or revelations of knowledge hit us like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. Such feelings or knowledge can sear through us with an intensity that can do some real damage if we aren't properly grounded. When it all becomes too much for us, we can be grounded in the love of Christ. Christ is an infinite well. He can help share the electrical load so we don't fry all of our circuits. When we are grounded in the love of Christ, we will not have to hold within our hearts more power than we can handle. But intense electrical jolts are not the only way that we can receive revelation nor the only way that we can experience or engage in love. We must also be rooted in love. Christ is the true vine. When we are rooted in the love of Christ we grow little by little and produce the fruits of the spirit - love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance (Galatians 5:22-23). This cultivation of love and knowledge is a much slower and more gradual process. It requires work and effort and we will have to weed out distractions or prune back branches that have grown too self important and have become unfruitful. Love and knowledge and the joy of existence are both power and growth, both a bolt of lightning and a fruit bearing tree, both sometimes so intense that it's almost more than we can handle and sometimes requires so much patience that it seems like it's not growing nearly fast enough. But when we have Christ to dwell in our hearts, we can be both grounded and rooted in His love. We will sometimes in massive jolts and sometimes growing mere millimeters at a time begin to comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of Christ’s love, until we are filled with the fullness of God - all of His light and all of His love and all of His knowledge.
