And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love …
- from Ephesians 3:17
 
Let’s play a game of MadLibs.
 
In today’s passage, Paul prays that his friends would be rooted and established in love. Let’s replace “love” with a blank space. What other words could we put in that blank space?
 
Some of us seek to root and establish ourselves via financial security. We feel steady and stable when our bank accounts are moving up and to the right. Our homes and cars and toys give us our sense of identity. We do this without even realizing we’re doing this.
 
Others of us seek to root and establish ourselves in our families. We focus on the family, pour ourselves into our families, obsess over our families until we’re completely codependent. We experience every bump in the family as a shocking threat to our own identities.
 
Work. Church. Hobbies. Clothing. Political affiliation. Locale. Physical fitness. Pop culture. Sports. You could probably add to this list. There are so many options for us to root and establish ourselves in and almost all of them are good things.
 
Paul’s prayer for his friends is that they would be rooted and established in love. Love changes everything. The pursuit of financial security apart from love turns us into Scrooges. The commitment to family apart from love turns us into helicopter parents at best (and monsters at worst). The same pattern holds with everything else we might use to root and establish ourselves.
 
Only love can hold us together. That’s how Christ does it. We need roots. We can’t live unless we’re established somewhere. And we need to put our roots down in the soil of love and to establish our homes on the foundation of love.
 
How does the love of God and neighbor impact the way you see yourself? What does it look like for you to root and establish yourself in love?