I heard a story of a foreigner here in America who saw a water fountain for the first time in his life.
The problem was that he could not see how to make it work.
It had no tap or buttons to press.
He became very angry and frustrated, but as he was about to turn away, somebody pointed to a little sign on the bottom of the fountain that simply said, “Stoop, and drink.”
Well, when he stooped over, he discovered that an electric eye detected his presence, and the water automatically came flowing out.
The man had all the water he needed to quench his thirst.
When we discover that all we ultimately need in life is found in Christ, we will quench our spiritual thirst in Him.
In Colossians 2:10 it says:
“and in Him you have been made complete.”
The word complete is a verb form of the word fullness in Colossians 2:9.
Our completeness comes from Jesus.
This, of course, does not mean we became God, rather we simply 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.”
A believer, in relationship to Christ, is like an empty bottle in the middle of the ocean.
As the bottle is in the ocean, he is 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 can lead us into legalism, emotionalism, 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, because we are complete in Him, then 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.
It says in John. 1:16:
“For out of His fullness we have all received and we were all supplied with one grace after another.”
Paul is saying: Christ is the fountain that will never run dry, so why resort to anything else, when we have all that we need in Christ.
There are many things in life that are seeking to lead us 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 thirsty for real life, through the only One who can satisfy that thirst!
Blessings!
Pastor Ken Keeler