12/01/2023
*JANUARY TEACHING SERIES*
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*PLEROMA: THE FULLNESS OF GOD*
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SERIES ONE: **UNDERSTANDING THE FULLNESS OF GOD**
Thurs. 12.01.23
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The fullness of God is the totality of everything God is—His attributes, His character, His perfection, His holiness, His power, His love, et cetera.
The fullness of God is His complete nature; it is who He is.
The Bible mentions the “fullness” (Greek pleroma) of God in a few different senses, and it is important to consider the context when interpreting these passages. Let’s briefly discuss three of the most direct references to the fullness of God, found in Colossians and Ephesians:
* In Colossians 1:19, Paul writes that “it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in [Christ]” (NASB).
* In Colossians 2:9, we see that “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”
Both passages powerfully affirm the fact that Jesus is God. The fullness, or totality, of God is found in Christ. Everything that can be said of God can be said of Jesus Christ (see John 14:7–11).
During the days of Jesus on earth, the fullness of God was in him bodly, ushering him to be a representative of the triune God.
Believers receives the fulness of God to become representatives and ambassadors of God, having a full reflection and radiance of Christ. That's to say, men must not see you in stature but the Christ that lives on the inside of God.
A point where one can bodly say, "This child looks exactly like His father ".
Paul continues with another incredible fact: that, in Christ, we ourselves have been “brought to fullness” (Colossians 2:10).
**Christians find their completeness in Christ and no one else. Jesus, who is the fullness of God in bodily form, makes us whole by His grace.**
Paul conveys the same idea in Ephesians 3:19. At the end of a lengthy prayer, Paul makes a series of requests, climaxing with a prayer that his readers “that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God."
Obviously, none of God’s creatures can achieve the fullness of God in the sense of becoming equal with God.
Rather, being filled to all the fullness of God describes the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise: "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." John.14.23
**One thing that vmoves the fullness of God (His power, Presence, Love) to have its place in man is YOUR LOVE for God. Loving God is being obedient and fulfilling His word.**
A man having the fulness of God cannot have his life being jeopardised by the devil.
A man full of God is a principality to the kingdom of darkness. Men of light weight and stature are men who the enemy is always after. The devil has the ability and the entrance to waste their lives.
The Christian journey conforms to a man building the capacity to host God.
Can God have his place in you? Are you up to the standard he required?
God indwells believers, and they become “partakers of divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, ESV). The riches of God are available to us. God by His grace, fills us with His Holy Spirit, enabling us to live more like Christ, in whom the fullness dwells.
The desire to live for Christ and becoming like him must be taken into consideration.
Jesus said that “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). **A never-ending source of life and satisfaction and spiritual abundance—this fountain of living water is the fullness of God within the believer.**
Francis Foulkes, a theologian and commentator, expresses the heart of Ephesians 3:19 well: “He [Paul] thus prays ultimately that they may receive not any attribute of God, or any gift of his, not love, not knowledge, not strength, alone or in combination—but no less than the very highest he can pray for, the full indwelling of God. . . . Of course the eternal God can never be limited to the capacity of any one, or all, of his sinful creatures; at the same time Paul does not want to pray for anything less than that God’s people may be filled to the very fullest of himself that he seeks to bring into their lives”.
**The goal of every Christian is to be filled completely with God, so that His character, His attributes, and His love define our existence.**
**How does a member of the Lord’s church conform to the image of Christ and “be filled with all the fulness of God”? Let us seek the answer from God’s word:**
**1\. By being spiritually minded and filled with knowledge of God’s will.**
“For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6). And, “For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” (Col. 1:9).
**2\. By being mature according to knowledge of the Son of God.**
“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 fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).
Maturity in your walk with Christ. That only comes through having knowledge of the Son of God…Not knowledge as in knowing about him, but knowledge as in you experiencing Christ. An encounter with him. There is a level of knowledge that comes at the cause of encountering Jesus.
*3\. By being partakers of the Divine nature and escaping the corruption that is in the world.*
2Pet.1.4 By means of these He has bestowed on us His precious and exceedingly great promises, so that through them you may escape \[by flight\] from the moral decay (rottenness and corruption) that is in the world because of covetousness (lust and greed), and become sharers (partakers) of the divine nature.
What is this divine nature?
2Pet.1.5 And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;
And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.
2Pet.1.8 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
**By adding and upholding the Christian graces to our faith, we can be assured of never falling away.**
**4\. By Christ being formed in us.**
“My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19),
Col.3.16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. (KJV)
Col.3.17 And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. (KJV)
**5\. By knowing the love of Christ.**
“And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19). And, “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16).
**Mature Christians are able to love their enemies, and are ready to forgive those who trespass against them.**
(Matt. 5:43-48; 6:14,15).
**6\. By being filled with joy and peace and abounding in hope.**
“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 15:13).
**7\. By standing perfect and complete in all the will of God.**
“Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God” (Col. 4:12).
Matt.5.48 You, therefore, must be perfect [growing into complete maturity of godliness in mind and character, having reached the proper height of virtue and integrity\], as your heavenly Father is perfect.
In conclusion, the fullness of God refers to the totality of who God is. In one sense, the absolute fullness of God is unknowable for finite creatures. However, in His grace, God chooses to communicate with His creatures, offering them new life in Christ, indwelling them by the Holy Spirit, and ultimately filling them with His fullness.
“One must face the fact that all the talk about His [God’s] love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His"
If you are a Christian, you can ask God to fill you with His fullness and have faith that “He who began a good work among you will complete it by the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6).
If you are not a Christian, Jesus invites you to a new relationship with God today. Why wait?
*JOSHUA N. DJANIE*
● Royal Spirit-Life Citadel
● +233 554080734
● [email protected]
