IMMERSED IN HIS FULLNESS

For in Him we live and move and have our being… – Acts 17:28a

God desires that His children be wholly IMMERSED in His Fullness: “For in Him we live and move and have our being…” (Acts 17:28a). In a manner of speaking, God wants to become our “Circumstance” and ‘Environment’! He wants us to be more conscious of Him than of our surroundings. You can see God’s hand in every circumstance and accept it with singing instead of complaining. However mightily the earth moves, turbulent the waters roar, or violently the mountains quake, “there is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High. God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved…” (Psa.46:2-5). Psalm 65:9 affirms that “the river of God…is full of water.” Enough of dryness; it is high time for us to be immersed in His abundantly flowing river of life: investing each day, each hour, each moment in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

As believers in Christ, we have access to the fullness of God in two ways: by creation and by reason of redemption. In a sense, we possess the fullness of God because we are His offspring – created in His Image and in His likeness (Gen.1:26-28). Acts 17:26-28 describes this elaborately: “And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’ Although we are made in the image of God however, we are not God. Our understanding of His fullness must therefore be put in context. Experiencing His fullness does not transform us into God; it does not equate possessing His sovereignty, omnipresence, omnipotence or omniscience!

In another sense, we partake in God’s fullness because we are new creatures in Christ: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new….that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation” (2Cor.5:17,19). Whether by creation or redemption, God’s fullness is in us in measures. Only His eternal Son – Jesus – has the Spirit without measure (Jh.3:34). An interesting analogy has been used to illustrate the human experience of being filled with the fullness of God: it is like a bottle in the ocean. When you take the cork out of the mouth of the bottle and sink it in the ocean, you’ll have the bottle completely full of the ocean’s water. The bottle is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the bottle. The ocean contains the bottle, but the bottle contains only a portion of the ocean. So it is with the Christian with reference to God’s fullness.

In reality, we are filled with God’s fullness when we immerse ourselves in His Word and His Spirit; in His Love, His Will, and His Ways. As A. W. Tozer eloquently wrote “we cannot contain all of God because God contains us; … we can have all of God that we can contain. If we only knew it, we could enlarge our vessel. The vessel gets bigger as we go on with God.” Our Christian walk should be a journey towards spiritual maturity that allows us to experience more and more of Christ’s fullness. To what extent are you immersed in His fullness? Are you partially in Him and partially in the world? Paul prayed: “Now may the God of peace sanctify you completely; and may your wholes spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1The.5:23). Complete immersion in God’s Fullness answers the deepest questions of life! Swim in Him! Give Him your all!