God-filled
The fullness of Christ is all about the most significant longing any of us can have-a yearning not merely for adventure but for much more than adventure. It is about God's longing for us. He looks at us, knows what he created us for, knows what we are capable of. God wants us to have fullness in our lives, and he brings it about not by filling our schedules but by filling us. But with what does he fill us? The biblical answer, loud and clear, is love. Somehow when God's love is able to flow into our consciousness and experience, it is translated into the muscle tissue of character. And should that surprise us? Are we hungrier for anything more than love?
Listen to the yearning in the words of the apostle Paul as he prayed for fellow believers: "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3: 17-19). We need to have the power to grasp the knowledge of the love of Christ, to really own it-to know how wide it is (reaching all around the world), how long it is (stretching from eternity past to eternity future), how high it is (elevating us to the qualities of heaven) and how deep it is (penetrating down to the darkest pits of our lives).
Our lives may be filled with activity (whether important or trivial, urgent or casual) and with people (from those in our inner orbit to the crowds we just bump into along the way), but fullness has to happen within. A person can go on safaris, hunt U-boats, and meet heads of state and still have an empty heart. Now is the time to do something about our emptiness, not when emptiness leads to desperation and hopelessness. The fullness of Christ is available, but it must be "grasped," and to do that we need "power."
-Mel Lawrenz, Patterns
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