To Encourage You

Colossians 1:19 “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

Perhaps nowhere else in scripture is the contrast between a person without God in his or her life and a person with God in their life seen as it is in the verse above.  The Scriptures talk much about God’s “fullness.”  God’s attributes are, in every sense of the word, full.  For example, God is full of love.  In fact, the Bible says that God is love (1 John 4:7).  The Bible talks about God’s love as something that surpasses knowledge, i.e., it is so incredible that we can never come to the end of it.  Whatever we know about it, or whatever we’ve experienced of it, there is still more – much more!  The Bible talks about God’s love as having four dimensions – breadth, length, height, and depth (Ephesians 3:18), rather than the three dimensions in which we observe everything.  What an awesome thing God’s full love is! 

Then the Bible says God is filled with righteousness (Psalm 48:10). Everything He does is right, and perfectly right.  He is also full of compassion (Psalm 78:38), power (Micah 3:8), grace (John 1:14), truth (John 1:18), and light (1 John 1:5).  God doesn’t come short in any of these attributes or any other attributes that He possesses. There is not any more to be had than He already has. 

Compare this to man.  All the things God is filled with we are empty of in our natural condition.  We are void of the wonderful attributes of God. We have no light, no love (i.e., agape love, the love of God), no righteousness, and we are filled with sin and all the emptiness that comes with sin.  We have no knowledge of God, no salvation, and no hope without Him.   

Man has absolutely nothing to add to Him for He is “full” without us. He dwelled in His fullness before the world began.  As God told Israel who thought they were somehow earning favor with God by offering Him animal sacrifices while they also flagrantly sinned against Him, “I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds.  For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine” (Psalm 50:9-12).  As Jesus told the church at Laodicea who thought they were fully adequate in and of themselves, “you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17).  

So, what’s the remedy? Can God’s fullness be made available to man, who in his natural condition is so utterly empty?  Wonderfully, the answer is “Yes,” but only in the person of Jesus.  As Colossians 1 tells us above, “in him (i.e., in Jesus) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”  It is when we receive Jesus that we receive all the fullness of God that dwells in Jesus.  As we are told in John 1:16, “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” In the Greek language in which these words were originally written, the term “grace upon grace” is the way of expressing the superlative. In other words, we receive “full” grace, i.e., the full favor of God – all that God can give us, more than we realize or can ever fully understand.  It is in that awesome and unlimited grace that God can do in the believer’s life “far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20).  By contrast, Jesus made it clear that “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). 

So, what’s your condition?  Are you empty or full?  Which would you rather be?  Without Him we can do nothing that glorifies Him and we have nothing.  And in fact, whatever meager worldly possessions we do have will one day be taken from us for all eternity (Mark 4:26).  However, with Christ, the Good Shepherd, “(our) cup overflows” (Psalm 23:5).