Complete in Christ

It is almost a cliché in Christianity for parents to say that raising children helps them understand the heart of God better. As a teenager, growing up as a fourth-generation Adventist on both my mother’s and father’s sides of the family, it was exactly the kind of cliché that would make me inwardly eye-roll and think, This again? But now, with year 40 on the horizon for me, I understand what my teenage self didn’t—that there’s a reason God used the parent-child relationship to describe Himself to us more than 250 times in the Bible. No other relationship we experience on earth comes as close to demonstrating the pure, unselfishness of divine love. 

Studying Colossians 2 for this week’s Sabbath School lesson while cradling my 11-week-old baby girl in the crook of my arm, I find myself reading the passage in a completely different light than I ever have before. Her bright little baby eyes, which have just started tracking and focusing on our faces, lock onto my eyes and light up with the purest, most uninhibited expression of love whenever she catches me looking down at her. Her pensive face breaks into radiant smiles, and she beams with excitement as though I have made her entire world just by looking at her. As I sit there, smiling and cooing back at her like a complete fool, I realize I have never known love as fierce and as overwhelmingly strong as the love she invokes in me.

It hits me, here in my nursery glider with her: This love—this deep, intense, I-would-do-absolutely-anything-for-this-baby love—is how God loves me, and even more.

We don’t think enough about how God loves us. We tend to assume that His love is as strong as the love our parents had for us. For many of us, human fathers did not provide unconditional love, making it hard to even conceptualize what love completely free of selfishness looks like. I like to think God loves like the kind of Father who sits for hours holding the baby because He can’t get enough of it. He’s the kind of Dad who shares pictures of every smile and videos of every laugh in the group chat. He’s the Dad who says “Oops! That’s OK!” when you mess up and treats cleaning up the mess like a game. He goes wild over the baby’s first steps. He shows up at every practice, game, and event, big or small. His kids are His entire world.

I will never forget when that love finally got through to me on the back pew of a tiny Seventh-day Adventist church, as an eye-rolling teenager. It must have been similar to when love found Paul, then Saul, on the road to Damascus. It broke us and drew us both in with its tenderness and irresistible charm, turning our lives completely around. That love didn’t care who we were or what we had done. I was a rebellious teen; Saul was persecuting the church. Love didn’t care. It just saw us and chose us—it wanted us.

Focus on Love

Throughout Paul’s letters you can see his longing for everyone he ministered to to be touched and changed by that love. In Colossians 2 he writes: “. . . that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the knowledge of the mystery of God” (verse 2). He wanted them to know love, to be confident and secure in it, to be drawn deeply by its mystery, and to wholeheartedly surrender to it.

We are complete in Christ, especially when we fully surrender our own efforts to fix ourselves.

I believe Paul understood very well that although churches and believers face a variety of outward issues, the main need and solution to all of them is to be rooted, grounded, immersed, and surrendered to the love of God. In Colossians 2 he addresses false teachings and philosophies, the importance of order in the church, and questions about such Jewish ceremonial rites as circumcision and feast days. Notice that, as you read the chapter, every issue he discusses points back to Christ. He reminds them that they are “complete” in Christ (verse 10), urges them to be buried and surrendered wholeheartedly to Jesus through baptism (verse 12), and points out that they were all dead in trespasses, emphasizing God’s power over sin (verses 13, 15). For Paul, it was Jesus, Jesus, Jesus in everything. As one of my college teachers used to say, he knew how to “keep the main thing, the main thing.”

Spiritual Scarcity

I can relate a lot to the church in Colossae. I too need to be reminded that I am “complete” in Christ. I have spent much of my post-conversion life caught up in the details of trying to figure out how I’m supposed to live my Christian life. I had what Adventist counselor Carol Cannon calls an addiction to the belief that Christians must always be right and perfect. Imperfections weren’t tolerated in my home or church, and I couldn’t believe that God could tolerate them either. So I tried harder and harder, more and more desperately, to fix my impatience, my anger, my bad habits. The more I “fixed” and imposed rules on my walk with God, the worse my problems became.

In the second half of the chapter Paul urges the Colossians not to fall into the trap of legalism. “Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations—‘Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle.’ . . . These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh” (verses 20-23).

Perfect in Him

Returning to the metaphor of my newborn, it’s almost amusing to think of her as anything less than perfect and complete. Yet, strictly speaking, she’s a bit of a mess! Her biggest achievements so far are learning how to smile and hold her head up off the floor. She can’t clean herself, feed herself, or fully control her limbs. She can’t burp unless we position her correctly. Her lower esophageal sphincter doesn’t close properly yet, so she spits up half her meal most of the time. Capable? Not quite!

And yet she is so beautiful, perfect, and complete because she is doing exactly what she was designed to do and trusting fully in us to do for her what she cannot do. In fact, I can attest from experience with my other children that it is much easier to keep her clean and tidy at this stage, when she is completely surrendered to my doing it for her, than it will be when she turns 2 and wants to “do it myself!”

We are complete in Christ, especially when we fully surrender our own efforts to fix ourselves. He does the work; we don’t. Does this mean we should abandon all our Christian practices? No! Not any more than I would abandon cleaning my newborn. Paul praises the church for its orderliness and steadfast faith (verse 5). God is in the business of cleansing and perfecting. He can just do it so much better when we let Him handle the work while we focus on trusting Him and giving Him access to every part of ourselves.

I’m not Paul, but today I want to encourage you with this: God is on your side. He is far more invested and interested in your life than you can imagine. He is powerfully able to do things for you that seem impossible. “When in faith we take hold of His strength, He will change, wonderfully change, the most hopeless, discouraging outlook. He will do this for the glory of His name.”[*]

[*] Ellen G. White, Prophets and Kings (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1917), p. 260.