259. Complete
Colossians 2:10And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.
In Christ we are complete. We are perfect in the sense of being complete, full, nothing lacking. This is the sense Jesus uses the word in the saying, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect [Matthew 5:48].” Perfect means whole and complete, not just righteous and innocent. Holy and whole are similar in sense and meaning. Nothing inherently punctures the whole character: there is no sin, no lack, no flaw, and nothing more is needed. Jesus makes us whole not only by forgiving sin but also by declaring righteous. Christ has definitively made us whole and complete by grace through faith in Him. It is a finished work, but personally and individually He is still in the process of making us complete, perfect, and whole, and He promises to finish the job. The process of making whole will be ongoing until our own death and resurrection.
Sin is forgiven, but Sin still remains, it still influences, and it still corrupts. We are complete in Christ now by faith, but we are not whole and perfect in life, evidenced by the fact that we will still die. We will be changed and we will be incorruptible in the body, and soul. For now, we stand on the promise of completeness; we can claim wholeness in Christ, by faith in Him, even though we make many mistakes, come up short, and commit many sins. We see the sins and we suffer the consequences, but we turn in repentance and faith to Christ and the Gospel, and we are cleansed thoroughly and completed entirely.
We live with both contradictory truths at the same time, and all the time; we are saint and sinner. We are incomplete and whole all at once.Sight sees the Sin; Faith sees the righteousness that makes us whole: we live by faith, not by sight.
By faith, we live whole and complete in Him. We need to believe that we are whole, since so much of life around us is fractured and so often life inside us seems fragmented. “Getting it all together” is a constant expression of desire and need. We do not need to get it together, to become complete; we only need to turn to Jesus who has it all together, who completes us. If we have Him, we have it all.