OUR DESTINATION: (1)

"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.” Ephesians 3:17b-19 (NIV)

Paul has laid out a very easy to follow roadmap for us to follow. He presents Biblical principles in a very logical order. But this week I’m actually going to start with the end of the passage and work our way toward the beginning. That’s because Paul reveals our destination at the end of the passage and before the roadmap is going to do us any good, we need to know where we’re headed. So let’s begin by identifying our destination:

TO BE SPIRITUALLY MATURE
…that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

God’s goal for the lives of His children is that they might experience a life that is filled to the very brim with the fullness of God. In fact, Jesus indicated that was the very purpose for which he came to earth:
“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10 (NIV) In the beginning of this verse Jesus says that if we are not careful, Satan will try to steal, kill, and destroy us so as to take away the fullness that is rightfully ours.  

Colossians 2:9, 10 (NIV) says “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.” In other words he wants us to use this fullness that’s at our disposal. So he prays that would become spiritually mature.

Let’s say that I want to become a doctor. Right now Amy is back there thinking “not another new career!” If I wanted to do that I’d have to go back to school and take a whole bunch of science classes. Then I’d have to go to medical school and do my residency. And after a number of years of long days and hard work, I would officially be a doctor. And when I got to that point, let’s suppose that one of you here needed open heart surgery. So you came to me and I said, “I’ll be happy to do that for you. I’ve studied how to do that and even assisted on a few surgeries. When do you want to schedule it?”

Even with your bad heart, you’d probably run from my office and go find a doctor with a whole lot more experience wouldn’t you? Why? I would have those same two letters behind my name – M.D. – as any other doctor. I would be just as much of a doctor as any of them. But I certainly wouldn’t consider myself to be “filled to the measure with all the fullness of being a doctor.” It would take many years before I could be all that I could be as a doctor.

I think that’s a pretty good picture of what we’re like spiritually. When we make the decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ, we get all of Jesus we’ll ever get and in Him we get the fullness of God. But we don’t experience the entire impact of that fullness right away. In fact, none of us will be able to know all that fullness in this lifetime here on earth. But as we mature and develop our relationship with God, we are able to experience more and more of that fullness operating in our lives.

Paul is going to address this whole idea of spiritual maturity in much more detail in chapter 4, but look what he says: “to prepare God’s people so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Ephesians 4:12, 13

What I’d like you to notice is that Paul makes a clear connection between attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ and our spiritual maturity. So the destination that God sets out before us is our spiritual maturity. But this is a different kind of destination, because it is one that I can never reach, at least not while I’m here on earth. That idea is foreign to our natural minds. We would never get in a car or on a plane and start out toward a destination we knew we could never reach. But God has determined that our spiritual journey will never come to a point of completion.

If there was anyone who could have ever completed his spiritual journey here on earth, it had to be Paul, But even Paul, as he approached the end of his life, recognized that he still hadn’t gotten there. And yet, he still kept striving to reach the final destination. He called it running the race to win the prize. We will never arrive, but the more mature we get, the closer we come to being all that God intends for us to be.

And what really breaks my heart is to look around and to see all of the Christians who want to settle for just getting by. They don’t seem to want to do the hard work that is needed to get on the journey toward spiritual maturity. They could have the fullness of God in their life, but they choose to settle for the cheap imitations offered by the world. It’s kind of like sitting in the garage with the engine running, but never leaving the garage to actually go anywhere. If you sit in the garage long enough with your spiritual engine running and the door closed, you generally will die spiritually; because you have chosen spiritual affixation. Choose the fullness of Christ and receive everything form God you can...if you do God will pour into your life a measure of His Holy Spirit that will transform and renew you. The one thing you can be full on in this life...is the fullness that Paul desires us to have. You are Loved...