The Fullness of Christ
Eph.4:13-15 - Till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the sleight of men and cunning craftiness, whereby they lay in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love may grow up into Him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.
Every demon in hell, at the behest of Lucifer himself, now roams the earth with one intended goal - to diminish Christ. Yes he desires to deceive sinners, yes he desires to spread false doctrine, yes he desires to deceive the church, but in the end he attempts to accomplish all that by pursuing one ultimate goal. He desires to diminish Christ in any and every way he can. Look at what Paul states, “the fullness of Christ”. You see, that must be our goal, his faithful followers, to pursue Christ with such a fervor and desperate thirst that we enter into His fullness. How many believers are satisfied with just a shallow taste, a small part of Christ and never pursue Him with vigor and their whole heart? Sadly, most.
Many times the devil diminishes Christ openly and with recognizable blasphemy. The cults have stripped Him of His deity and made Him just a human way shower. Many church growth movements have stripped Him of His power and made Him a pragmatic way to improve your life here on earth. The emergent movement has thrown Him into the liberal lion’s den to be attacked by doctrinal infidels. And so many ordinary pew dwellers have made Him a golden calf that they visit once a week in a large building only to leave Him there to visit next week. All of these are committing the deepest of sins for they have become complicit in Satan’s strategy to diminish the Risen Christ who should be our very lives.
I have become convinced in a very short time that most of these different deceptive streams are like black holes, once a person is captured and embraces the error his chances of repenting and being rescued are extremely slim. There are some, praise God, but surely not many. This does not mean that all who fall into a deceptive trap are unbelievers or even are not servants of Christ, but it does mean that they are an unwitting part of an overall strategy of deception that may find its greater scope in future generations. So we must speak to those who have not yet been taken in by deception and to them we must strongly exhort to remain faithful and reject fully these different “winds of doctrine” that diminish Christ. They are alluring and they massage the carnal nature that seeks something new, but they are dangerous and are only a repackaging of the earliest deceptions beginning in the Garden of Eden.
But now it comes down to this, do you and I seek the fullness of Christ in our own lives? After we have openly aligned our doctrinal stand with the historic and orthodox truths of the faith, do we pursue Him with all our hearts intimately and personally? If we do not then our orthodoxy is hollow, it may be doctrinally structured but without the depth of relationship that authenticates our Biblical orthodoxy as…well…Biblical. God is not satisfied with defending Christ, His desire is that our desire is Him.
But today the church chases the latest charismatic preacher, the latest innovative series, the latest glossy book, the latest tortured doctrine, and anything else that is new and fresh and makes everyone feel so “in vogue” and post modern. It is all such a spiritual merry-go-round of shallow newness regardless how seemingly intellectual are the wrappings. We have become enamored with language and its enlightening perspectives complete with caveats, cultural understandings, Hebraic parameters, and a plethora of relevant issues that alter God’s Word instead of the reverse. It would do us well to see human language as conduits of understanding through which God speaks His Word rather than slick tools that like Lego blocks can be rearranged to mean whatever we desire while ignoring what the Father is saying.
Linguistic exchange is an exercise in communication but does little to promote truth since all language comes with incomplete definitions as well as nuances and indeed different understandings. Opposite positions can be defended by two well intentioned communicators and persuade different sections of listeners who are processing the information differently. There are many variables at play, emotions, education, presuppositions, openness, prejudice, upbringing, friends, personal admiration, and even the opinions of those we love. So unless we judge everything theological by the written revelation we have nothing more than a communicative kaleidoscope driven by the particulars I mentioned previously. Rare is the instance when someone is demonstrably changed through discussions of positions already well established in our minds.
Only when the Scriptures are approached with an open and humble spirit can there be any genuine expectation of arriving at the mind of Christ. The books of men can be a stumbling block from every perspective and they usually serve to further cement familiar opinions because most are our own chosen expressions that we expect to deepen our views, not change them.
Summarily, discourse can only be spiritually edifying when something is said that drives us to the Scriptures not to disprove it but be taught by God’s Spirit. This is of course the most difficult of personal disciplines since we all come inherent with a self/personal view of the uprightness of our motives. In essence we measure ourselves by ourselves. So the Scriptures must be the standard by which we arrive at all spiritual truth even while buffered by our individual interpretations. Go to many churches and you will see people being convinced by the oratorical prowess of the preacher, or the strength of his personality, or even the earthly logic used as a pitcher to pour out Scriptural interpretation. And in reality the spiritual laziness that lives openly in the pews reveals a great hindrance as well.
So in light of all these speed bumps how can we seek, much less arrive at, the fullness of Christ? First, we must reject all men. What I mean by reject is to eliminate any idolization of any and all men. This is rampant within the church and even though Paul dealt with the “I am of so and so” principle in First Corinthians the church still practices it subliminally and overtly. There are misty eyed followers of men like MacArthur, Warren, Bell, Calvin, and a long list of others who not only live off their regurgitated offerings, they actually have emotional feelings for these men which can easily cloud their objectivity. There is nothing wrong with benefiting from some godly Christians and their gifts, but I believe we have taken it way too far.
The recent phenomenon that has arisen among certain evangelicals is the discernment ministry and mentality. This also has become a burden even when the teachings that are being challenged need to be exposed and uncovered as error or compromise. But there is a growing occurrence in some people’s lives and ministries that have sidetracked them from the fullness of Christ and a personal pursuit of Him and have led them to pursue error and receive the true teachings of the Savior as continuing proof of the Biblical rightness of their view. In essence, they have become trapped as defenders of truth and left being pliable objects of worship that views themselves as nothing and Christ as everything.
Even as they pray they construct phrases and sentences in such a way as to more accurately confront the error they see today instead of with humility and brokenness bow before Christ with no other sinner in mind but themselves. It is insidious and can be veiled in false humility, expressing humble truth to the Lord as a continuing way to prove their own orthodox perspective. That is nothing more than pride itself. And this phenomenon is an addiction that is assimilated into a believer’s life almost unnoticed because, after all, we are espousing and standing for truth. But when practiced our very thought processes can be manipulated into a perspective that both focuses upon the rightness of our theology and the error of others. So we end up with a devotional life that is centered upon a doctrinal battle instead of Christ Himself.
A person who is caught up in this type of mindset listens for phrases and sentences and hears them through the prism he has constructed to identify any wisp of error and also identify truth and receive it as a great orthodox response to the aberrant teachings of others. It is a well meaning matrix that actually dilutes truth and is the mental instrument that conforms the truth into a continual debate and not the sincere milk and meat that should be transforming all of us into reflecting the Person of Christ not just providing more exculpatory evidence of our own doctrinal innocence and orthodoxy. And in the final analysis, this type of mental perspective breeds a deep and many times discernable self righteousness that gives birth to a club and even pack mentality that does not reflect Christ.
The defense of Christ and His truth is a sacred ministry that cannot be the focus of any believer’s life. Each follower of Christ must have a precisioned and honed journey whose lonely goal is Christ and His pleasure. That means our calling is to become like Christ through a surrendered will and a thirst for Him and His righteousness. Defending truth must be an outpouring of that journey, not the journey itself. All of us should be keenly aware that while we are defending truth that we ourselves do not measure up to it and are demonstrably deficient in following it. Speaking truth without a tangible sense of our own record of transgressions and our own finite understanding of that truth must be the truth through which we present all truth. And all truth is Christ, so who among us can present and reflect the entirety of the Savior, and if not, what evidence can we provide to substantiate any pride or self righteousness?
The fullness of Jesus Christ is available by God’s grace to all who believe and follow and pursue with all their hearts. Christ must be our daily life and experience, He must be primal in our desire and central in our living. There can be no competitors either good or bad, and even our ministries cannot be become a distraction in our pursuit of Him. Everything we do for Him and in obedience to His calling must never take His place in our journey. The core of our journey must be the footsteps of Mary and not Martha, and all the ministry and offices and callings must be the accoutrements of faithfulness but they must not serve as Christ in our walk. Our Lord Jesus is the pinnacle and indeed the only goal to which we must aspire.
Distractions are enemies and good intentions are detours. Proudly embracing systematic theologies can sometimes hinder the systematic dismantling of our own flesh. Humility is the most elusive of Christ’s qualities, and pride can even surreptitiously project itself in the most self effacing language while in reality being just an ingredient in self righteousness. And since God resists the proud, the journey of a proud disciple of Christ comes to a dramatic halt even though his religious activities and his defense of the truth seemingly continue. Yes, this journey of following in the steps of Jesus comes with much self denial and little praise, much introspection and little outward judgment, much self pronouncements and little public pronouncements, much personal callings to repentance and little public calls for that same repentance.
When we enter the fullness of Jesus Christ in our own lives of devotion, worship, and learning, we will find that our teaching and preaching to others is an extension of that secret life of the Spirit, and the true and authentic devotee of Christ in all His fullness will teach and preach with an ever present and tangible sense of his own inadequacies. Not just inadequacies about his abilities, no, deep feelings of inadequacies about his heart and life as it concerns a total surrender to His Lord and Master. That is true humility, cultivated in many hours of prayer closet services with only one Preacher and one student. Meeting with Jesus in the power of the Spirit is a river, a river with many tributaries and eddies that flow throughout our beings. Some can be verbally expressed while others are sacred experiences of the heart that lose any translation as they travel out from our spirits. But with all the streams and tributaries flowing they still carry the water from the same river, and that river is Christ.
He is our portion and He is our guide, our mentor, and indeed our august Lord. It is His likeness alone into which we desire to be broken and reformed again. It is His nature that we beg to control us and our hearts, and it is His essence that we desire to come forth from our lives at the expense of any of our own personal and selfish projections. And in order for this Christ fullness to be realized the preparation must be complete. There can be no resurrection of Himself until there is a crucifixion. And since Christ has died “once for all” he will not repeat that redemptive act of grace, no, this cross we face now no longer has the inscription “King of the Jews” as a header. This cross has your name adorning its top, this cross has my name over its planks. This crucifixion will be painful and will strip us of us. This cross must end with death, death of ourselves. This crucified death will make way for the resurrection, not of us, God forbid, for that would only require another crucifixion.
This death provides the tomb through which Christ Himself will come forth in the power of His resurrection. This will not be a new you, this will be the eternal Him, living and bursting forth as Lord and Master of your entire life. There can be nothing like the fullness of Christ, nothing compared to a crucified life that is overcome by Christ in all His fullness. Contentment is complete, sacrifice is privilege, reputation is worthless, loss is gain, persecution is pleasure, and when Christ is present in all His fullness our lives are His…
Every demon in hell, at the behest of Lucifer himself, now roams the earth with one intended goal - to diminish Christ. Yes he desires to deceive sinners, yes he desires to spread false doctrine, yes he desires to deceive the church, but in the end he attempts to accomplish all that by pursuing one ultimate goal. He desires to diminish Christ in any and every way he can. Look at what Paul states, “the fullness of Christ”. You see, that must be our goal, his faithful followers, to pursue Christ with such a fervor and desperate thirst that we enter into His fullness. How many believers are satisfied with just a shallow taste, a small part of Christ and never pursue Him with vigor and their whole heart? Sadly, most.
Many times the devil diminishes Christ openly and with recognizable blasphemy. The cults have stripped Him of His deity and made Him just a human way shower. Many church growth movements have stripped Him of His power and made Him a pragmatic way to improve your life here on earth. The emergent movement has thrown Him into the liberal lion’s den to be attacked by doctrinal infidels. And so many ordinary pew dwellers have made Him a golden calf that they visit once a week in a large building only to leave Him there to visit next week. All of these are committing the deepest of sins for they have become complicit in Satan’s strategy to diminish the Risen Christ who should be our very lives.
I have become convinced in a very short time that most of these different deceptive streams are like black holes, once a person is captured and embraces the error his chances of repenting and being rescued are extremely slim. There are some, praise God, but surely not many. This does not mean that all who fall into a deceptive trap are unbelievers or even are not servants of Christ, but it does mean that they are an unwitting part of an overall strategy of deception that may find its greater scope in future generations. So we must speak to those who have not yet been taken in by deception and to them we must strongly exhort to remain faithful and reject fully these different “winds of doctrine” that diminish Christ. They are alluring and they massage the carnal nature that seeks something new, but they are dangerous and are only a repackaging of the earliest deceptions beginning in the Garden of Eden.
But now it comes down to this, do you and I seek the fullness of Christ in our own lives? After we have openly aligned our doctrinal stand with the historic and orthodox truths of the faith, do we pursue Him with all our hearts intimately and personally? If we do not then our orthodoxy is hollow, it may be doctrinally structured but without the depth of relationship that authenticates our Biblical orthodoxy as…well…Biblical. God is not satisfied with defending Christ, His desire is that our desire is Him.
But today the church chases the latest charismatic preacher, the latest innovative series, the latest glossy book, the latest tortured doctrine, and anything else that is new and fresh and makes everyone feel so “in vogue” and post modern. It is all such a spiritual merry-go-round of shallow newness regardless how seemingly intellectual are the wrappings. We have become enamored with language and its enlightening perspectives complete with caveats, cultural understandings, Hebraic parameters, and a plethora of relevant issues that alter God’s Word instead of the reverse. It would do us well to see human language as conduits of understanding through which God speaks His Word rather than slick tools that like Lego blocks can be rearranged to mean whatever we desire while ignoring what the Father is saying.
Linguistic exchange is an exercise in communication but does little to promote truth since all language comes with incomplete definitions as well as nuances and indeed different understandings. Opposite positions can be defended by two well intentioned communicators and persuade different sections of listeners who are processing the information differently. There are many variables at play, emotions, education, presuppositions, openness, prejudice, upbringing, friends, personal admiration, and even the opinions of those we love. So unless we judge everything theological by the written revelation we have nothing more than a communicative kaleidoscope driven by the particulars I mentioned previously. Rare is the instance when someone is demonstrably changed through discussions of positions already well established in our minds.
Only when the Scriptures are approached with an open and humble spirit can there be any genuine expectation of arriving at the mind of Christ. The books of men can be a stumbling block from every perspective and they usually serve to further cement familiar opinions because most are our own chosen expressions that we expect to deepen our views, not change them.
Summarily, discourse can only be spiritually edifying when something is said that drives us to the Scriptures not to disprove it but be taught by God’s Spirit. This is of course the most difficult of personal disciplines since we all come inherent with a self/personal view of the uprightness of our motives. In essence we measure ourselves by ourselves. So the Scriptures must be the standard by which we arrive at all spiritual truth even while buffered by our individual interpretations. Go to many churches and you will see people being convinced by the oratorical prowess of the preacher, or the strength of his personality, or even the earthly logic used as a pitcher to pour out Scriptural interpretation. And in reality the spiritual laziness that lives openly in the pews reveals a great hindrance as well.
So in light of all these speed bumps how can we seek, much less arrive at, the fullness of Christ? First, we must reject all men. What I mean by reject is to eliminate any idolization of any and all men. This is rampant within the church and even though Paul dealt with the “I am of so and so” principle in First Corinthians the church still practices it subliminally and overtly. There are misty eyed followers of men like MacArthur, Warren, Bell, Calvin, and a long list of others who not only live off their regurgitated offerings, they actually have emotional feelings for these men which can easily cloud their objectivity. There is nothing wrong with benefiting from some godly Christians and their gifts, but I believe we have taken it way too far.
The recent phenomenon that has arisen among certain evangelicals is the discernment ministry and mentality. This also has become a burden even when the teachings that are being challenged need to be exposed and uncovered as error or compromise. But there is a growing occurrence in some people’s lives and ministries that have sidetracked them from the fullness of Christ and a personal pursuit of Him and have led them to pursue error and receive the true teachings of the Savior as continuing proof of the Biblical rightness of their view. In essence, they have become trapped as defenders of truth and left being pliable objects of worship that views themselves as nothing and Christ as everything.
Even as they pray they construct phrases and sentences in such a way as to more accurately confront the error they see today instead of with humility and brokenness bow before Christ with no other sinner in mind but themselves. It is insidious and can be veiled in false humility, expressing humble truth to the Lord as a continuing way to prove their own orthodox perspective. That is nothing more than pride itself. And this phenomenon is an addiction that is assimilated into a believer’s life almost unnoticed because, after all, we are espousing and standing for truth. But when practiced our very thought processes can be manipulated into a perspective that both focuses upon the rightness of our theology and the error of others. So we end up with a devotional life that is centered upon a doctrinal battle instead of Christ Himself.
A person who is caught up in this type of mindset listens for phrases and sentences and hears them through the prism he has constructed to identify any wisp of error and also identify truth and receive it as a great orthodox response to the aberrant teachings of others. It is a well meaning matrix that actually dilutes truth and is the mental instrument that conforms the truth into a continual debate and not the sincere milk and meat that should be transforming all of us into reflecting the Person of Christ not just providing more exculpatory evidence of our own doctrinal innocence and orthodoxy. And in the final analysis, this type of mental perspective breeds a deep and many times discernable self righteousness that gives birth to a club and even pack mentality that does not reflect Christ.
The defense of Christ and His truth is a sacred ministry that cannot be the focus of any believer’s life. Each follower of Christ must have a precisioned and honed journey whose lonely goal is Christ and His pleasure. That means our calling is to become like Christ through a surrendered will and a thirst for Him and His righteousness. Defending truth must be an outpouring of that journey, not the journey itself. All of us should be keenly aware that while we are defending truth that we ourselves do not measure up to it and are demonstrably deficient in following it. Speaking truth without a tangible sense of our own record of transgressions and our own finite understanding of that truth must be the truth through which we present all truth. And all truth is Christ, so who among us can present and reflect the entirety of the Savior, and if not, what evidence can we provide to substantiate any pride or self righteousness?
The fullness of Jesus Christ is available by God’s grace to all who believe and follow and pursue with all their hearts. Christ must be our daily life and experience, He must be primal in our desire and central in our living. There can be no competitors either good or bad, and even our ministries cannot be become a distraction in our pursuit of Him. Everything we do for Him and in obedience to His calling must never take His place in our journey. The core of our journey must be the footsteps of Mary and not Martha, and all the ministry and offices and callings must be the accoutrements of faithfulness but they must not serve as Christ in our walk. Our Lord Jesus is the pinnacle and indeed the only goal to which we must aspire.
Distractions are enemies and good intentions are detours. Proudly embracing systematic theologies can sometimes hinder the systematic dismantling of our own flesh. Humility is the most elusive of Christ’s qualities, and pride can even surreptitiously project itself in the most self effacing language while in reality being just an ingredient in self righteousness. And since God resists the proud, the journey of a proud disciple of Christ comes to a dramatic halt even though his religious activities and his defense of the truth seemingly continue. Yes, this journey of following in the steps of Jesus comes with much self denial and little praise, much introspection and little outward judgment, much self pronouncements and little public pronouncements, much personal callings to repentance and little public calls for that same repentance.
When we enter the fullness of Jesus Christ in our own lives of devotion, worship, and learning, we will find that our teaching and preaching to others is an extension of that secret life of the Spirit, and the true and authentic devotee of Christ in all His fullness will teach and preach with an ever present and tangible sense of his own inadequacies. Not just inadequacies about his abilities, no, deep feelings of inadequacies about his heart and life as it concerns a total surrender to His Lord and Master. That is true humility, cultivated in many hours of prayer closet services with only one Preacher and one student. Meeting with Jesus in the power of the Spirit is a river, a river with many tributaries and eddies that flow throughout our beings. Some can be verbally expressed while others are sacred experiences of the heart that lose any translation as they travel out from our spirits. But with all the streams and tributaries flowing they still carry the water from the same river, and that river is Christ.
He is our portion and He is our guide, our mentor, and indeed our august Lord. It is His likeness alone into which we desire to be broken and reformed again. It is His nature that we beg to control us and our hearts, and it is His essence that we desire to come forth from our lives at the expense of any of our own personal and selfish projections. And in order for this Christ fullness to be realized the preparation must be complete. There can be no resurrection of Himself until there is a crucifixion. And since Christ has died “once for all” he will not repeat that redemptive act of grace, no, this cross we face now no longer has the inscription “King of the Jews” as a header. This cross has your name adorning its top, this cross has my name over its planks. This crucifixion will be painful and will strip us of us. This cross must end with death, death of ourselves. This crucified death will make way for the resurrection, not of us, God forbid, for that would only require another crucifixion.
This death provides the tomb through which Christ Himself will come forth in the power of His resurrection. This will not be a new you, this will be the eternal Him, living and bursting forth as Lord and Master of your entire life. There can be nothing like the fullness of Christ, nothing compared to a crucified life that is overcome by Christ in all His fullness. Contentment is complete, sacrifice is privilege, reputation is worthless, loss is gain, persecution is pleasure, and when Christ is present in all His fullness our lives are His…
And His alone.
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1 comment:
Thank you for such a powerful exhortation.
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