Rooted and grounded

That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, - Ephesians 3.17

A little later in Ephesians Paul is going to talk a lot more about stability. Here though is the beginning of the discussion of the basics of stability. 

There are two things that we need at the very start. By faith Christ dwells in our hearts. But then we are rooted and grounded in one special trait. We must be rooted  and we must be grounded in love. 

Paul uses two different terms here to describe what it means to have a solid foundation. He uses the rooted and he uses the term grounded. Rooted deals with trees and plants. Grounded deals with architecture. 

We all know that great trees have roots. I have heard that root systems can be even bigger than the tree. If trees are not well rooted they are not going to last. Storms blow over the biggest and strongest trees if the storms are bad enough so if the root system is weak the tree will surely not survive. 

When buildings are built the foundation must go deep. If not the building will not last. It will eventually collapse. Many years ago a church i was going to decided to build a new building. The new building was going to be built on a slope. As the contactors started digging they found no bedrock so had to keep digging till they found it. There was extra expense, but we knew that if we didnt go to bedrock the building wouldn't last. 

The source of our root's nutition is love. The bedrock of our faith is love. Love is our rooting and our grounding. It is the love of Christ that constrains us to do what we do. It must be our motivation. 

Where is our rooting? In what are we grounded? Truly there is no other but Christ and His love.