Cover Article
Rooted and Built Up
There is a mesquite tree in west Texas that has been standing for over a hundred years. Droughts have scorched the ground around it. Winds have torn limbs from its trunk. But the tree will not fall, because its taproot reaches forty feet into the earth, drinking from water no surface wind can touch. The psalmist had that kind of tree in mind: “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3). Jeremiah echoed it: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord… He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes” (Jeremiah 17:7–8). That is the picture Paul paints for the church at Colossae: “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). Rooted. Built up. Overflowing. Three words that describe the life God is shaping you into.
To be rooted in Christ is to anchor your life to a Person, not a program. And what a Person. Paul told the Colossians exactly who they had received: the One “in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19), who “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). When you were buried with him in baptism and raised through faith in the working of God (Colossians 2:12), you sank your roots into that bedrock. Not into your own effort. Not into the shifting sand of feelings or worldly philosophy. Into Christ himself. And here is what changes everything about ordinary life: a rooted tree does not strain to stay standing. It simply drinks. Jesus said it plainly: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me” (John 15:4). The secret of the Christian life is not trying harder. It is sinking deeper.
But Paul does not stop at rooted. He adds built up—because God is not content to leave you where you planted. He is constructing something. Peter uses the same image: “You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5). Growth in Christ is not automatic. We grow as we devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42), as we let the word of Christ dwell in us richly (Colossians 3:16), as we gather on the Lord’s Day to break bread and encourage one another (Hebrews 10:24–25). Every sermon heard with an open Bible, every prayer offered from a surrendered heart, every hymn sung with genuine melody to the Lord (Ephesians 5:19) is another course of stone laid in the structure God is building. And the mortar holding it all together? Paul names it: thanksgiving. “Abounding in thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:7). Not polite gratitude. An overflowing, can’t-contain-it gratitude that comes from knowing “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). Gratitude rewires how you see the world. It turns complaints into prayers and entitlement into wonder.
Paul wrote these words because the Colossians needed them. False teachers were circling, peddling “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition” (Colossians 2:8). The pressure to drift has not changed in two thousand years. Voices still whisper that the gospel is not enough—that you need something more, something newer, something the Scriptures never authorized. But a tree with forty-foot roots does not topple in a windstorm. Paul told the Ephesians the same thing: grow up in Christ “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). The deeper your roots, the steadier you stand. And you do not stand alone. Just as roots intertwine beneath the surface of a forest, your growth is tangled up with the growth of every brother and sister around you. We are “members one of another” (Romans 12:5). The hand cannot say to the foot, “I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Your faith strengthens theirs. Their faithfulness steadies yours. So sink your roots deep, beloved. Let God build you up, stone upon stone. And let gratitude overflow from a heart that knows it has been given far more than it could ever deserve.
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