Advent: Love
Where are your roots? Can you picture your childhood home? The town you grew up in? What culture, traditions, family, and friends come to mind when you think about your roots? Many times at Christmas we go back to them, revisiting the places and people from which we came. These roots can bring you great joy and nostalgia, or they can bring back memories you would rather leave behind.
As the story goes, Jesus’ roots were in Bethlehem. He came from the humblest of circumstances, born in a stable of all places. No room at the inn, no rock-n-play around, Jesus was placed in a manger. It wasn’t an instagrammable birth plan.
But that does not tell the whole story. You see, Jesus’ roots weren’t all there. His home was with His Father. And He left His position of glory, sacrificing everything to bring Himself down to our level. To rescue us. From His very first breath on this earth, Jesus’ life was rooted in a depth of love we cannot even fully comprehend. That sacrificial love continued all throughout Jesus’ life and ended in an ultimate display upon the cross. Everything about Jesus’ birth, life, and death was rooted in incomprehensible love.
And now, when we are adopted into the family of God, we are also rooted in love.
Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, writes this “I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17b-19 CSB)
In Colossians, Pauls writes something similar to the Colossians: “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” (Colossians 2:6-7 ESV)
When you follow Christ, He gives you new roots, the strongest, most eternal kind. When you are rooted in Christ, you are rooted in unshakable love.
This word, rooted, is rhizoo in Greek. In the Blue Letter Bible Dictionary, it is defined as “to cause to strike root, to strengthen with roots, to render firm, to fix, to establish, cause a person or a thing to be thoroughly grounded.” When Christ established His Kingdom here, He did it with love, so that we could also be established in that love when we entered it. When you follow Christ, He gives you new roots, the strongest, most eternal kind. When you are rooted in Christ, you are rooted in unshakable love. And it is not something you visit every now and again. It is who you are.
This is indeed good news for us, especially when we consider a year like 2020. Perhaps you have not felt very rooted in much of anything this year. I confess I have felt very wobbly at times, considering the suffering, grief, division, anxiety, loneliness, and need for prayerful discernment in decisions big and small. If you have felt shaken this year, you are certainly not alone. We have experienced cataclysmic waves on both personal and global levels.
When I consider the lengths and widths, heights and depths of the suffering of this year I cannot count it. No number reported on the news can get me to comprehend it. We lament this broken world and ask Jesus to return quickly, because it can feel unbearable for our souls. We need endurance as we are continually faced with such incalculable hardship.
Yet, for the Christ follower, we must consider something else incalculable—love that surpasses any surge of death that we face on earth today. I can’t even truly wrap my head around it, but “O death where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55) We are rooted in Christ’s unshakable love for us— the love that took our sin and death upon His shoulders on a cross, that we may have life in Him, and life abundantly. And so the way forward for the Christ follower, even in 2020, is not the death rooted in this world, which has no hold on us, but a life rooted in the love of Christ.
Whatever 2020 took from you, my sister, it did not take away Christ’s love for you.
Whatever 2020 took from you, my sister, it did not take away Christ’s love for you. That is impossible. May you receive the gift of His love in abundance this Christmas and allow it to soothe all the raw hurts and fill up any empty places in your soul. May God’s love be a comfort to you as you dwell upon it. As Paul encouraged the Ephesians and Colossians churches, may we also be encouraged. May the knowledge of His love bolster us to stand firm in the days ahead, and may we be able to share this love to others as it overflows through you.
I have a brother in my house church who answers every single phone call with “Jesus loves you, hello!” It always makes us chuckle, but it’s becoming a thing now. Because he doesn’t just answer the phone that way, he lives his life that way. It is so evident that he believes this greeting to be true. His father just passed away from COVID-19 and he is grieving, yet he still answers the phone the same way, with an incredible and profound joy in his voice. He is rooted in love, and he reminds me that I am too.
Dear sister, if there is one thing I could tell you about love this Advent, it’s this: Jesus loves you. That’s it, but that’s everything. Receive and let your roots be love.
Jillian Vincent loves Jesus. She's a wife, a mother of boys, and a Dayton enthusiast. Jillian currently is a stay at home mama and spends nap times writing and discipling other women. She would (almost) die for an avocado, a cup of coffee made by her husband, a novel that makes her cry, and a bouquet of sunflowers.