Complete in Jesus

There was poor European family who saved for years to buy tickets to sail to America.

Once at sea, they carefully rationed the cheese and bread they had brought for the journey.

After 3 days, the boy complained to his father, “I hate cheese sandwiches. If I don’t eat anything else before we get to America, I’m going to die.”

Giving the boy his last nickel, the father told him to go to the ship’s galley and buy an ice-cream cone.

When the boy returned a long time later with a wide smile, his worried dad asked, “Where were you?”

“In the galley, eating three ice-cream cones and a steak dinner!”

“All that for a nickel?”

“Oh, no, the food is free,” the boy replied. “It comes with the ticket.”

Christ has all we need. It comes with the “ticket.”

In Colossians 2:10, we read:

“and in Him you have been made complete.”

In another translation it reads this way:

“and you have a full and true life in Christ.”

Our completeness comes from Christ alone.

This, of course, does not mean we became God, but simply that we share Christ’s life.

We share in His divine nature because of our union with Him, as it says in 2 Peter 1:4,

“For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.”

Paul’s favorite phrase for our identity in Christ is simply in Him  or  in Christ.

Our relationship to Christ is like an empty bottle in the middle of the ocean.

As the bottle is in the ocean, we are in Christ.

And, as the bottle may be filled full with the fullness of the ocean, without depleting that fullness, so a believer is filled full in Christ, the One who is the fullness of God.

If we do not believe we are already complete in Christ and believe we need something else, it could lead us into legalism, emotionalism, or looking for various experiences to make us complete, or it can just lead to a frustrated Christian life.

We grow spiritually, not by adding something we do not have already in Christ, but by appropriating what we do have already in Christ.

Christ is the very fullness of God, and as we draw on Christ’s fullness, we are filled by Him.

We have already received the true source of all we need for life and for all eternity.

So we are to abide in Him and we will continue to experience life out of His fullness.

Paul told the Colossian believers that Christ was the Source of all that they needed, so why would they resort to the false teaching when they have life in Christ.

These false teachers were seeking to lead them away from that fountain of living waters.

As Jeremiah 2:3 says about the Israelites:

“They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water and they have hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, which cannot hold water.”

Are we going after the broken cisterns of our culture, which cannot hold water?

If we are, we have forsaken the only true fountain of living water, Jesus Christ.

May we quench our thirst for real life, through the only One who can satisfy that thirst! We are complete in Him!

Blessings!

Pastor Ken Keeler, Director of Church Ministries