And "_the_ Christ," not Christ alone. Why does the apostle say this? There is a reason for the definite article, as we have found elsewhere.[95] The apostle is asking for his Asian brethren something beyond that possession of Christ which belongs to every true Christian,--more even than the permanence and certainty of this indwelling indicated by the verb. "The Christ" is Christ in the significance of His _name_. It is Christ not only possessed, but understood,--Christ realized in the import of His work, in the light of His relationship to the Father and the Spirit, and to men. It is the Christ of the Church and the ages--known and accepted for all this--that St Paul would fain have dwelling in the heart of each of his Gentile disciples. He is endeavouring to raise them to an adequate comprehension of the greatness of the Redeemer's person and offices; he longs to have their minds possessed by his own views of Christ Jesus the Lord.
_The heart_, in the language of the Bible, never denotes the emotional nature by itself. The antithesis of "heart and head," the divorce of feeling and understanding in our modern speech is foreign to Scripture. The heart is our interior, conscious self--thought, feeling, will in their personal unity. It needs the whole Christ to fill and rule the whole heart,--a Christ who is the Lord of the intellect, the Light of the reason, no less than the Master of the feelings and desires.
The difference in significance between "Christ" or "Christ Jesus" and "the Christ" in such a sentence as this, is not unlike the difference between "Queen Victoria" and "the Queen." The latter phrase brings Her Majesty before us in the grandeur and splendour of her Queenship. We think of her vast dominion, of her line of royal and famous ancestry, of her beneficent and memorable reign. So, to know the Christ is to apprehend Him in the height of His Godhead, in the breadth of His humanity, in the plenitude of His nature and His powers. And this is the object to which the teaching and the prayers of St Paul for the Churches at the present time are directed. Understanding in this larger sense the indwelling of the Christ for which he prays, we see how naturally his supplication expands into the "height and depth" of the ensuing verse.