The Tree of Life

“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)

I had to go back a long way to put today’s verse into context.  This passage comes from that letter that Paul wrote to the Church at Ephesus.  Let’s back up a bit to see what he was talking about.

Looking at this chapter and many of Paul’s other writings we see that he starts verses with words like “for”, “and”, “but” and even “therefore”.  I was taught that when you see these kinds of words in the Bible (most of them conjunctions) you must look back to see the rest of the thought.  In our English language a conjunction is simply a word that links other words, phrases or clauses.  To get the entire meaning of what you are reading, you must look at the word, phrase or clause to which the conjunction is linked.

So I went all the way back to Ephesians 1:1 because I kept seeing those linking words.  As you read on through you can see that Paul is revealing something that had been hidden since the beginning of time.  It is called a mystery (Eph 3:3).  And that great mystery is “⁶That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel: ⁷Whereof I [Paul] was made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power (Eph 3:6-7).”

And today’s verse is found in the middle of a prayer that Paul has for that church (Eph 3:14 “I bow my knees unto the Father …”). Paul desires that these people allow Christ to dwell in their hearts “by faith” and that they love one another and may know together how large the love of Christ is for them even though it is incomprehensible in the human mind.

Oh how blessed we are to have the grace of God offered to us, even though we are not his chosen people of Israel.  How wonderful it is to be grafted into tree of life, rooted and grounded in the love of Christ!