My Pastor says, “Once we lose our vision for God, who He is, what He has done through His Son Jesus Christ, we get a vision for something else. God is put on the shelf, an abstraction. Christ’s work on the Cross becomes a footnote in history that has application when I die but is irrelevant now.”
Has this ever happened to you? Have you lost your focus on Christ and begun to look at temporary situations as all there is?
I want to redirect you today from focusing on yourself, and your situation, the things that get you down, and cause you to feel bad to focusing on Christ in the Bible.
In the NASB the terms “in Him” appear 94 times. The terms “with Him” are there 114 times. If something is mentioned that many times, it has got to mean something! So let us look today at Him and discover some of the realities about Jesus. It is inevitable that we relate some of them to ourselves but it is important that you understand that these things are true about Him regardless of how they do or don’t affect you.
. …in Him you have been made complete… Jesus is able, by virtue of who He is to make us complete. I have heard women and men say of their spouse, “He/She completes me.” While I have no doubt that we can find someone who so matches our personality that it seems that we are incomplete without them the only One who can truly complete you is Christ.
Remember that you are born with that God-shaped void in your spirit. You and I were born sinners, spiritually dead, without life, unable to do anything about it at all. We are helpless and as hard as we may try, as many good deeds as we may do we are still insufficient and incomplete without Christ.
Who else in the history of all the world can make a person complete? No one but Jesus.
When we are complete in Him, we are also immediately positionally secure. This means that no matter how you may feel about it God says that you are secure. Recently I was watching the hurricane recovery efforts in the south, and I watched a man being hoisted into a helicopter in the arms of a rescuer. The man had some security line around him, and he was being held tightly by the other man but I can only imagine that he was a little concerned about how secure he truly was as he was lifted hundreds of feet in the air.
The man who is the rescuer knows exactly how secure his charge is. He knows what it takes to rescue him, and he has done all that is necessary to harness the man in. Regardless of how that man being rescued feels, he is safe.
Jesus knew exactly what was needed to rescue you and He went the whole distance. He did not stop short of the necessary sacrifice to secure your eternal destiny. This is why as he hung on the cross he cried, “It is finished!” because all that needed to be done was done.
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. 2 Corinthians 5:21 (NASB)
You and I cannot add nor subtract from that in any way because we did not do it! Our salvation was monergistic meaning it was a work done by One. We are passive in this process because we have been saved by someone else. Just like that man could not get up into that helicopter alone; you cannot get saved from your sin without Christ for He is your rescue.
More next time.