«　WEEK 9　DAY 5　»

　　Eph. 3:17-18 That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be full of strength to apprehend with all the saints what the breadth and length and height and depth are.

　　We are rooted in Christ so that He may make His home in our hearts (Eph. 3:16-19). In Ephesians 3 the apostle prays that God the Father would grant the believers to be strengthened through God the Spirit into their inner man, that Christ, God the Son, may make His home in their hearts, that is, to occupy their entire being, that they might be filled unto all the fullness of God (vv. 14-19). The phrase make His home is only one word in the Greek, katoikeo. This Greek word basically means to settle down in a dwelling, to make a dwelling place. The prefix of this word, kata, means “down.” (CWWL, 1984, vol. 3, “God’s New Testament Economy,” p. 475)

　　God the Father is exercising His authority through God the Spirit to strengthen us into the inner man, that God the Son may make His home deep down in our hearts…. Christ is not only in us (Col. 1:27) but… He is also making His home downward in our heart. He is housing Himself in our heart.

　　We all have entered into the Triune God, and we are now abiding in Him. Our abiding in Him affords Him a way to abide in us triunely. The Triune God is now abiding in us, so we have been rooted into Him. While we are rooted into Him, the Father works to strengthen us through God the Spirit so that God the Son, Christ, may make His home deep down in our heart, which is composed of our mind (Heb. 4:12), will (Acts 11:23), emotion (John 16:6, 22), and conscience (Heb. 10:22)…. Since we began to pray that God the Father would strengthen us into the inner man, Christ gradually began to occupy our mind, take over our emotion and will, and possess our entire conscience.

　　Our heart is like a house that has four rooms, and these rooms are the mind, the emotion, the will, and the conscience. Christ has the desire to occupy every room of our heart and every corner of every room. As He makes His home downward in our heart, we become strong to apprehend with all the saints the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ (Eph. 3:18). These are the dimensions of the universe…. All these dimensions describe the immeasurable Christ, whose dimensions are the dimensions of the universe. He is the breadth, length, height, and depth. We can only apprehend His universal dimensions with all the saints. (CWWL, 1984, vol. 3, “God’s New Testament Economy,” p. 476)

　　In our experience of Christ, we first experience the breadth of what He is, and then we experience 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. Later we experience Him rising up as the height and finally descending as the depth. As we shall see, our experience of Christ must eventually become three-dimensional, like a cube.

　　If we have only the length of Christ, without any breadth, our experience will be a “line,” that is, an experience that is long and narrow to an extreme. Our experience of Christ, however, should not have only one dimension, like a line, but it should have two dimensions, like a square, and then three dimensions, like a cube…. If we have only a “line” experience of Him, this “line” will eventually continue until it reaches an extreme.

　　In our experience of Christ, we should go on from the two dimensions to three, from a “square” to a “cube.” A cube is solid. Both in the tabernacle and in the temple the Holy of Holies was a cube. The dimensions of this cube in the tabernacle and temple respectively were ten cubits and twenty cubits. The New Jerusalem will be an eternal cube, twelve thousand stadia in three dimensions. The church life today must also be a “cube.” (Life-study of Ephesians, pp. 286, 288)

　　Further Reading: Life-study of Ephesians, msg. 33; CWWL, 1984, vol. 3, “God’s New Testament Economy,” ch. 39