Filled Full | Discipleship Prayer Day 31

Your way is the way of fullness…

Fill us full every morning with your faithful love so we can rejoice and celebrate our whole life long. (Psalm 90:14)

We often talk of being filled. In fact, our English language has developed a grammatical suffix — ful — to easily express the idea of being filled with something — hopeful, pitiful, regretful, and so on.

For the Psalmist, being filled with God’s faithful love was the prerequisite for rejoicing and celebration in life. Good words. There are many things with which we ought to desire being filled — joy, peace, thanks, gratitude, hope, faith, and love (just to name a few). The abundant life is a life filled with such things (John 10:10).

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, 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 3:17–19 NIV)

There is a filling and fullness, however, that is unique to the people of God, the church. We are to be “rooted” in the love of Christ, able to comprehend its width, length, height, and depth, and willing to accept the reality that this deep, abiding, agape love transcends our own definitions and boundaries. When this happens, we are filled to the brim with the fullness of God!

The Son is the image of the invisible God,…For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,… For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. (Colossians 1:15, 19; 2:9–10 NIV)

What is the “measure of all the fullness of God?” It is Christ. The fullness of God is seen, heard, and experienced in and through Jesus Christ, and him alone. Only in Christ can we truly and fully be filled! This fullness begins with the agape love of Christ and is lived out daily through thoughts, words, and actions flowing from this same agape love.

God put everything under Christ’s feet and made him head of everything in the church, which is his body. His body, the church, is the fullness of Christ, who fills everything in every way. (Ephesians 1:22–23 CEB)

Christ is the fullness of God and we, the body of Christ, represent the very real presence of the Messiah in our world today; a fullness of presence lived out in our (always growing and expanding) Christlike lives and our purposeful expressions of Christlike love to all people, in all places, at all times.

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S.E. Fairbanks is the founder of Do Everything In Love Community, and author of Beautiful Grace: The Heart of Transformation (written under a pseudonym) and the Beauty of Small Things. He is a cross-cultural educator, ordained minister, and fan of the Portland Trailblazers who loves spending time writing, photography, singing, and spending time with his wife and three children.

Image credit: S.E. Fairbanks

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