Sermon Recap
Know Your Roots
Brian Hunter · January 11, 2026
“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”
Scripture Referenced
Recap
Brian opened the year with a passage Paul wrote from prison. Ephesians 3 comes out of his first Roman imprisonment, which is worth sitting with before reading a word of it, because the man praying that his readers would be strengthened inwardly was himself in chains. The prayer is not a wish for easier circumstances. It is a request for a deeper root system.
The stroll through the passage stopped at the phrase most people read past. Paul kneels before the Father and asks that they would be strengthened with power through the Spirit in the inner being. Not strengthened by attendance, not by effort, not by knowing more. The strengthening is the Spirit’s work, and it happens in the part of a person nobody else can see.
He built the idea out with two pictures. The first was an apple. The fruit is good and the fruit is nourishing, but the seeds are the part that carries the next tree, and most people throw them away. The second was a morning spent trying to get a stubborn root out of the ground with a rock bar and a narrow shovel, discovering that the honest answer to a deep root is not more force. Roots go where they are fed, and they take their time doing it.
That set up the question the message actually turned on. Roots grow. That is not in doubt. The only real question is into what. Into a relationship with Jesus cultivated over years of time actually spent with him, or into whatever else happens to be within reach. Nobody drifts into depth.
Brian also told the room what was coming. He had not planned to talk about Israel that morning, and he said so plainly, but the subject of the next several weeks would be exactly that. Know your roots. What followed became the Unbreakable series, and this message is the doorway into it.