On the Facebook page from Quite Fire Devotionals, written by Herbert E. Berkley, is this challenge post.
I don’t know Berkeley, but I know that Head Full, Heart Hollow will touch a spiritual nerve if you will seriously consider its message and reflect on its personal application to your life.
Head Full, Heart Hollow
Ephesians 3:14—19 (ESV)
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
We can explain the gospel in five minutes. We can diagram Paul’s argument in Romans. We know the Greek word for love—agape—and we can tell you why it matters that Paul uses it instead of phileo.
And some days, we feel absolutely empty.
Not doubt. Not rebellion. Just… emptiness. A strange hollowness that sits right next to all that knowledge like an uninvited guest who won’t leave.
Paul prays something in Ephesians 3 that sounds like a contradiction. He asks that believers would “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (v. 19). How do you know something that surpasses knowing?
But consider the alternative—because many of us have lived it.
We spend years knowing about Christ’s love without being filled by it. We measure its dimensions—breadth, length, height, depth—without ever standing under its weight. We become librarians in a burning building. Cataloging flames we refuse to feel.
Here’s what emerges from Paul’s prayer: theology was never meant to be a destination. It’s a doorway.
Study isn’t the problem. The apostle prays for comprehension. He wants the Ephesians to grasp love’s dimensions. But he doesn’t stop there. He prays they would comprehend so they could know—and knowing, be “filled with all the fullness of God.”
The goal isn’t information. The goal is fullness.
And fullness doesn’t come from studying love. It comes from being rooted in it. Grounded in it. Dwelling there.
We’ve done something strange to the faith, haven’t we? We’ve turned it into a course to complete rather than a Person to inhabit.
We read books about prayer instead of praying. We listen to podcasts about rest instead of resting. We master the vocabulary of knowing God while keeping Him at arm’s length—close enough to describe, far enough not to disturb.
Not always. Not everyone. But enough of us, enough of the time, that the exhaustion has become familiar.
The Corinthians had this problem. Paul told them, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). Then he added something that should stop us: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.”
If knowing hasn’t led to loving, we haven’t really known yet. Not the way God means knowing.
Biblical knowing isn’t data transfer. It’s covenant intimacy. It’s what Jesus defined as eternal life itself: “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
So the question presses in on all of us:
Are we pursuing knowledge about Christ as a destination—or as a doorway to Him?
Are we gentler for all our study? More patient? More aware of being loved?
Paul’s prayer points somewhere specific. Through comprehension, toward communion. Through knowledge, toward what knowledge cannot contain.
Christ doesn’t offer Himself as a subject to master. He offers Himself as a presence to be filled by. And the pathway isn’t climbing higher through better arguments. It’s sinking roots. Getting grounded. Staying put long enough to be held.
We don’t ascend to fullness. We’re filled as we’re loved.
If you’ve felt the gap between what you know and what you experience—you’re not alone. And you’re not disqualified.
That ache might be the truest thing about any of us right now. It means we haven’t settled. It means somewhere, we still know the difference between a library and a home.
Christ’s love surpasses knowledge. Which means there’s always more of Him than our best theology can hold. And He’s not waiting for us to understand Him fully before He fills us.
He’s waiting for us to stop studying the door and walk through it.
ThePreachersWord 