Have you ever gone to the Philadelphia Library or some other huge library?
You go in and there are rooms and rooms of books.
Can you imagine the amount of words it took to write all these books?
But the amazing thing is that all those books were written using only 26 letters!
These 26 letters provide everything that is needed to write these books and it was not necessary to go outside of the alphabet.
Christ stated that He was the Alpha and Omega (first and last letters of the Greek alphabet).
He provides everything we need and we do not have to go outside of Him.
He is all sufficient and we are complete in Him.
In Colossians 2:10, we read this:
“and in Him you have been made complete.”
The word complete is a verb form of the word fullness in vs. 9.
Our completeness comes from Him.
This, of course, does not mean we became God, but we simply share Christ’s life.
Another translation puts it this way:
“and you have a full and true life in Christ.”
We share in His divine nature because of our union with Him (2 Peter 1:4).
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 could 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.”
Christ is the fountain that will never run dry, so why would we resort to the cisterns that this world offers, when we have it all in Christ?
Our culture is 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 thirst for real life, through the only One who can satisfy that thirst!
Blessings!
Pastor Ken Keeler, Director of Church Ministries