Col. 2:10a ... "In Him you have been made complete."
When we enter this world at birth, we come with gross deficiences of many kinds and then spend the rest of our lives trying to fill them in and become complete in our constitution. In the first moment of life an infant must learn to breathe, or else it will die. During the first day he must learn to take nourishment. As more time passes, the developing person must learn to sit up, crawl, walk, talk, feed himself, etc. When the child reaches the age of about five, his formal education begins. For the next dozen years, and then perhaps for another four to eight past that, he will invest great amounts of time, energy, and money in the effort to progress through grade school, college and maybe graduate school so that his education will be complete enough for him to enter the profession of his choice.
One of the most serious human deficiences, however, involves the soul. Because man is a fallen creature, his soul has been greatly weakened from what God originally intended it to be. It is inclined to sin, which impairs, pollutes and fully brings about its destruction. We are emphatically told in Rom. 3: 23 that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." When Isaiah had the vision of God in the Temple and beheld His resplendent glory, he could not help but cry out, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips." (Isa. 6:5). All people are in the same position that Isaiah was, no matter how "good" we, or others, might think ourselves to be. And in our weak and seriously deficient condition we have no means within ourselves to heal the disease that afflicts our souls, or to repair the breaches in our characters, or to lift ourselves up into a complete state for acceptable presentation to our Creator. When Paul contemplated where he stood. he proclaimed, "Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:24). But there is no need for despair, for God has provided the necessary means by which our souls can be perfected.
Because God loves us, He has given His Son to lift us up and reclaim us. We are told in Rom. 5:8-9 that "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him." By the power of Jesus' blood shed on Calvary our sin can be removed from our souls, which are then healed and restored to the power and capacity that our Father designed them to possess. This is accomplished when we submit to baptism into Christ, for it is there that our former sinful nature is put to death and "newness of life" is granted, (Rom. 6:3-4). The Lord then admits the new convert into His church (Acts 2:47), which is the assembly of all who have been "rescued from the domain of darkness (sin)," (Col. 1:13). And within the church God has set up various offices "for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature [complete] man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." (Eph. 4:12-13). In other words, in Christ we have the removal of the sins that make us incomplete; and in the church, which is the body of Christ (Eph. 1:22-23), we have necessary assistance for growing into a complete person in Christ.
By diligent effort in education a person might be able to approach close to mental perfection. By arduous training one might manage to come close to physical perfection. But unless a person comes to Christ and submits his life to that superior Teacher-Physician, he will continue spiritually in a state of waste and impotency bound for eternal ruin.
