Ephesians 3:17a speaks of Christ’s making His home in our hearts. This is a deeper work of Christ’s living in us, and it is also our more advanced experience of the indwelling Christ. Our heart is the totality of all our inward parts-the mind, the emotion, the will, and the conscience. When Christ makes His home in our heart, He controls our entire inward being and supplies and strengthens every inward part with Himself. When we were saved, Christ came into our spirit. Now He also wants to spread into every part of our inward being. As we are strengthened into our inner man, our regenerated spirit, the way is opened for Christ to spread in us, from our spirit to our mind, emotion, will, and conscience. The more Christ spreads within us, the more He settles down in us and makes His home in us.
We may liken our heart to a house with many rooms, including the rooms of the mind, the emotion, the will, and the conscience. Although we have Christ in us, we still need to allow Him to settle down in our heart to saturate, possess, occupy, and fill every room within us. For this cause, we need to pray to the Father that He would grant us, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit into our regenerated spirit (v. 16) that we may receive the divine dispensing. Thus, Christ will spread into every part of our entire being and make His home in our heart.
Ephesians 3:17b goes on to say that this Christ who lives in us and who is making His home in our hearts will cause us to be rooted and grounded in His love. Our being rooted and grounded in love is related to our being God’s cultivated land and God’s building (1 Cor. 3:9). As God’s cultivated land, we need to be rooted for growth, and as God’s building, we need to be grounded for our building up. Thus, our being rooted and grounded is a matter concerning life and building, indicating that we believers experience Christ for life and building. When Christ makes His home in our hearts, He saturates all our inward parts with Himself. By such a divine dispensing, we are being rooted and grounded in His love, and spontaneously there will be life and building.
Ephesians 3:17 mentions faith and love at the same time. Christ makes His home in our hearts through faith that we may be rooted and grounded in His love. To experience Christ we need faith and love (1 Tim. 1:14). Faith enables us to apprehend Christ, and love enables us to enjoy Him. Neither faith nor love are ours; they are His. His faith becomes our faith, by which we believe in Him, and His love becomes our love, by which we love Him. The love in which we are rooted and grounded is the divine love realized and experienced by us in a practical way. With such a love we love the Lord, and with that same love we love one another. When we are rooted and grounded in Christ’s love, we grow and are built up in His life.
Ephesians 3:18 says that we “may be full of strength to apprehend with all the saints what the breadth and length and height and depth are.” When we have been strengthened into our inner man, Christ can then make His home in our heart and thereby occupy our whole being and saturate it with Himself. In this way, we, being rooted and grounded in Christ’s love, are full of strength to apprehend the dimensions of Christ.
The dimensions of Christ are the breadth, length, height, and depth, which are the dimensions of the universe. To apprehend such dimensions of Christ we need all the saints, not individually but corporately. In our experience of Christ, we first experience the breadth of what He is, and then the length. This is horizontal. When we advance in Christ, we experience the height and depth of His riches. This is vertical. First, we experience Christ spreading as the breadth and the length. Then, we experience Him rising up as the height and descending as the depth. Thus, our experience of Christ is three-dimensional, like a cube; it is not one-dimensional, like a line. We must go back and forth and up and down in our experience of the Christ who lives in us, that eventually our experience of Him may be a solid “cube.” When our experience is like this, we cannot fall or be broken.
When Christ lives in us, He not only enables us to experience and enjoy Him making His home in our hearts, to be rooted and grounded in love, and to apprehend His breadth, length, height, and depth, but He also enables us to know His knowledge-surpassing love (Eph. 3:19a). The love of Christ surpasses knowledge, yet we can know it by experiencing it. According to our mentality, the love of Christ is beyond our understanding. Our mind is not able to know it. But since we have Christ living in us, we are enabled in our spirit to know the love of Christ through our experience and enjoyment of Him.
Actually, the love of Christ is Christ Himself. Just as Christ is immeasurable, so also is His love; hence, it is knowledge-surpassing. Even so, we can know it in our spirit, not by knowledge but by experience. Christ in His universal dimensions and in His immeasurable love is like a vast, limitless ocean for us to experience and enjoy adequately.
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