Excerpts from Know the Unknowable (Note: I will post the video as soon as it is available.)

We have a house plant that is like something out of a science fiction movie. Someone gave it to Karen – this nice, shiny, dark green plant – and she watered it and took care of it and it got bigger. When it was in danger of becoming root-bound, Karen transplanted it into a bigger pot. I think it might have outgrown that pot as well, so she put it in an even bigger one and now it is threatening to take over our house. We recently set it next to my side of the bed. I have dreams that it is going to eat me in my sleep.

Sometimes plants need to be transplanted to be healthy and strong. Sometimes people do too. In this passage, Paul talks about people being rooted in love, and the good things that can come from that.

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Being rooted (verse 17) is an agrarian image. Being established, as the NIV has it (also verse 17), is a construction image. Paul loves to mix those two metaphors. He does it here. He does it in Colossians 2:7. He does it in 1^st Corinthians 3:9, where he calls the Corinthian church both God’s field and God’s building.

Being rooted implies life. A seed without life won’t root, it will only rot. Being established (better, laying a foundation) implies intention. No human has to be involved in a plant taking root (just ask the teams that pull weeds around the church) but a building’s foundation doesn’t just sprout from the ground. Laying it requires planning, intention, and effort. Both images – agrarian and construction – have something important to teach us.

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People who are rooted and grounded in love are strong enough to … what? What are they strong enough to do? The answer is unexpected. We don’t need this strength so to be faster than speeding bullets or more powerful than locomotives. We need it to comprehend (the Greek word means “to grasp” or “to lay hold of”) truth. Sir Francis Bacon said that knowledge is power; this kind of knowledge is a superpower. Being rooted in love is the prerequisite to this kind of power. Being rooted in lovelessness is an obstacle to it.

The Greek word for power here is not the usual one. This one has the idea of being strong enough to accomplish something. It is the word a koine Greek speaker would use to say (for example): “He is strong enough to do 100 pushups.” But, in this case, we are strong enough, verse 18, to grasp the width and length and height and depth of the love of Christ.

Some people simply are not strong enough to lay hold of – to comprehend – the love of Christ.  We tend to think there are smart people who comprehend things and there are strong people who get things done. The smart people wore glasses, walked around with their noses in books, and got beat up a lot when they were kids.

And of course, it was the strong kids who beat them up – the kids who didn’t wear glasses and would have trouble finding a book in the Public Library. But if they did, they’d only use it to hit the smart kids over the head.

But that is a false dichotomy. Nowhere in the Bible does smart equal weak or strong equal stupid. Quite the opposite: there are some things we will never grasp until we become strong.

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Paul prays the Ephesians “may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and so to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:17-18). Don’t miss the words, “together with all the saints.” It is not a throwaway clause.  

We will not have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is in isolation from the saints. We need all the saints – all God’s own people – to get a handle on (to grasp) the immensity of Christ’s love. Even though we can never succeed in measuring or quantifying it, we can grasp it; can know it experientially—but only in partnership with all God’s other people. You know things I do not know, see things I have not seen, just as I know and see things you do not. Only together can we begin to get a handle on – to grasp – the unending, overwhelming love of Christ. Only in partnership with all Jesus’s people does being “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (verse 19) become a possibility.

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No one can accuse the Apostle Paul of thinking small. What a goal! “…that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” This is the goal to which Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians has been headed all along. Paul is praying for the church – not just individuals – to be filled with all the fullness of God. His prayer, which comes right out of the Old Testament, is that God will come to the Living Temple – that’s the end of chapter 2 – as he did Solomon’s temple and the tabernacle before that and fill it with all his fullness. This is not a prayer for Christians in isolation but for Christians in community—Christians in the church. Don’t forget that God wants to demonstrate (verse 10) to rulers and authorities his manifold wisdom through the church.