Is it really possible to be filled with the fullness of God?
I’ve been thinking lately about a prayer at the end of Chapter 3 of Ephesians. Paul cuts right to the heart of his desire for the Christians in Ephesus, and in a sense, for you and me as well, to experience the fullness of God.
I pray that out of his [God’s] glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. 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. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:16-21 NIV
There is so much going on in this prayer. Look what Paul is praying for. Well, first let’s look at what he’s not praying for. He’s not praying for someone to get a new job, to find the right spouse, or to have enough money to pay the bills. He’s not even praying for someone to be healed.
A deep prayer
Paul is going much deeper than that. And it’s a broad, collective prayer for everyone in the Ephesian church. It’s really a prayer for us today, as well.
Paul is praying that God will strengthen us way down deep in our inner spiritual being.
Just think about that for a minute and how God can do that for you, and for all of us collectively.
I love the progression in this prayer. Once we are strengthened by God in our inner being, we’re more receptive for Christ to actually dwell there permanently, instead of just inviting him in when we have a problem.
And then Paul prays that we’ll be able to grasp, understand, and hold onto the width, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love. He’s really saying Christ’s love has no boundaries.
Once we have become aware of and accepted this unlimited love Christ has for us, we don’t need a bunch of human knowledge about Christ. We go beyond that. We don’t need words and theories, man-made explanations for anything. Because we know in our hearts and experience this love.
Filled with the fullness of God
And this leads to something absolutely amazing. Paul acknowledges in his prayer that when we have this unlimited sense of Christ’s love, the result is that we’re “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
Now just imagine for a minute you are a member of the Church in Ephesus and you’re there when the letter is read to the congregation. Let’s say you have just recently become part of this church because someone told you about Jesus of Nazareth, that he was the Son of God, had been crucified, and then rose from the dead.
You were curious and the more you heard about Jesus, the more your heart yearned to know more about the love he taught and lived. You realized the gods and idols you used to worship were pretty much a façade. And so you had left behind your previous approach to worship and with it, your materialistic view of and approach to life. You were discovering a more spiritual way to live.
Before Paul’s letter arrived at your church, you’d been trying out this new way of praying to an invisible God and you’d actually seen some answers to your prayers. That had never happened when you prayed to those stone idols.
But your prayers had mostly been about how to navigate daily life and its challenges. When you prayed, you pretty focused on how to solve your own problems.
The infinite love of Christ
But when you hear the prayer in Paul’s letter, which I read earlier, you realize there’s much more to being a follower of Christ than you had ever imagined.
To feel the infinite love of Christ. Wow! That’s incredible. You’ve had a little taste of this love and you yearn for more.
But then Paul says that you and all your fellow church members can be filled with all the fullness of God. You look around the room where everyone is gathered. You see the light shining in their eyes. You see their tears of joy as you wipe away your own tears.
And you feel something you’ve never experienced before: the most amazing sense of being loved in a deep, deep spiritual way. And you realize this is what it means to be filled with all the fullness of God.
Nothing else matters at that moment. You don’t even remember the problems you came to church with just an hour ago. They’ve totally dissolved. You feel free. You feel seen and known and loved by God.
God’s glory in every generation
But Paul’s prayer is not over. He acknowledges that God is able to do more than you could possibly imagine and that God is at work in your life, and not just in you, but in everyone at church. And when he sums up by giving God all honor and glory, you’re right there with him.
But what’s this about the glory of God being throughout all generations? You suddenly realize this Jesus thing is much bigger than you had realized. This is something not just for your time for every generation to come.
Well, let’s come back to the 21st century. But let’s hold onto the spirit of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians.
Being filled with the fullness of God
I want to focus specifically on this idea of being filled with all the fullness of God.
First I want to point out this is a collective thing. It doesn’t mean that you or I individually have all the fullness of God in us. It takes all of us to be filled with all of God’s fullness.
But even then, is this actually possible for us today? Or is it something that will happen way off in the future?
Well, when I read this prayer of Paul, I get the sense that he expected us to begin experiencing all these blessings, including being filled with God’s fullness, here and now, not just in the future.
And every time I ponder this prayer, it brings me back to something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Matthew 6:33 CSB
Paul is not praying for answers to specific problems or challenges. He’s praying that we will experience the kingdom of God, here on earth.
So how, on earth, do we do that?
Finding answers to Paul’s prayer
Fortunately, Paul has given us some guidelines in the rest of his letter to the Ephesians. The next three chapters, 4, 5, and 6, share very specific things we can do and ways we can think that help us experience the answer to his prayer.
I encourage you to read the whole book of Ephesians to get a real flavor of what Paul has to say to this community of early Christians, struggling to keep the light of Christ shining brightly in a materialistic society. Their challenges are not that different from ours.
But I’m going to focus on just three verses in Chapter 4, which are the epitome of the shift that takes place in our thinking and our actions when we follow Christ, and which allows us to experience being filled with God’s fullness.
throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception. Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy. Ephesians 4:22-24 NIV
Now I’ve talked about these three verses lots of times on The Bible Speaks to You Podcast. And there’s one episode in particular. It’s Episode 144: Finding Your Identity in the Bible with Keith Ferrin.
Getting rid of the old self
Before we can even come close to being filled with all the fullness of God, we have to empty out everything that is unlike God.
If the closet in your bedroom is filled with clothes that are worn out, too small, or hopelessly out of fashion, you won’t have room for new clothes that fit and are in style until you get rid of what’s already there, which is taking up all or most of the space.
Getting rid of old clothes from your closet is a metaphor for what Paul means when he says to “throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception.”
He makes it sound so easy. Just like it sounds easy to get rid of all the old clothes in your closet. But have you ever decided to clean out a closet, and then have a hard time getting rid of some old favorites, even though you never wear them and they are way too small or worn out? They are basically useless, but you keep them anyway. They were part of who you were at some point.
Easy or hard to let go of the old?
It seems so easy, in theory, to let go of outgrown, worn out clothes, but it’s not always so easy to do in real life.
Just so, it would be a lot easier to let go of the sins and materialistic ways of thinking that used to be part of our lives, except that we remember and still identify with this old life style, these old thinking patterns. But if we still think of ourselves as defined by our sins and the labels the material world has pasted on us, we have not put off the “old sinful nature” and the “former way of life” Paul talks about.
That would be like going to your closet full of old clothes and either shutting the door because you don’t want to deal with the mess, or you want to hold onto stuff that’s no longer useful, and then complain that you don’t have room for new clothes.
If you refuse to get rid of the old clothes, you’ll never have room for new ones.
If you never let go of identifying yourself with the mistakes you’ve made and the sinful attitudes you’ve carried around, you’ll never be able to take the next steps of being renewed by the Spirit and discovering your true self as a child of God, created in righteousness and holiness.
“It’s too hard to get rid of the old, sinful self”
Now you may be thinking, Hey James, doesn’t it seem a little presumptive to just say I’m not a sinner anymore. I’ve tried that but then I mess up and sin all over again. I can never seem to get past that first step in verse 22 of putting off my old sinful nature. It keeps coming back.
Well, I totally hear you. The thing that’s been helpful for me is to realize I can’t do this by myself. It’s not a process of the human mind or willpower. It’s not an intellectual exercise or saying certain words in your prayers.
It’s really about experiencing and accepting the love of God, which Paul talks about in that prayer from Chapter 3 of Ephesians at the beginning of this episode (and the top of this page).
When you feel the love of Christ, even in a small degree, it doesn’t mean you will never make another mistake or never sin again. But when you feel Christ’s love, it allows you to see yourself the way God defines you as His image and likeness, instead of defining yourself by your sins.
The first step is basically a shift in the way you see yourself and realizing the sins are not part of who you are. They’re something you did, but they are not your identity. That’s why you can put them off.
Renewal by the Spirit
That brings us to verse 23, being renewed by the Spirit in the way you think.
As I said, you can’t do this by yourself. It is the work of the Holy Spirit. Some translations put it this way,
And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; Ephesians 4:23 KJV
Or a more modern way of saying the same thing is: change your mindset. Think about things from a different perspective, from a more spiritual, God-focused perspective. It’s the Holy Spirit which reveals this to you.
When you quit looking at yourself from the perspective that you are trapped in sin and don’t know how to or don’t want to let go of it, and you start seeing yourself from the perspective that you are the image and likeness of God, who loves you unconditionally, there will be a shift in your mindset. You will see things differently.
When you feel God’s love – and I don’t mean by the word feel, just the human emotion of love – when you actually experience God’s love even in a small degree, you won’t want to sin, because the Holy Spirit has purified you. You will be renewed in the way you think and act.
As I said, it doesn’t mean you’ll never sin again, but it means you’re on the path to freedom.
Spiritual renewal
And once you’ve been renewed spiritually, you’re ready to accept as valid, what Paul calls “your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.”
This is who you really are right now, “created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.” Just because you haven’t seen it or fully accepted it yet, doesn’t mean it’s not true. You just have to open your eyes and your heart to it and take these spiritual steps we’ve been talking about.
So how does all this relate to being filled with all the fullness of God?
To the degree you experience and accept God’s unconditional love for you, which He reveals through Christ, and to the degree you put off the idea of yourself as sinful by nature, let the Holy Spirit renew and regenerate you, and see yourself as the “truly righteous and holy” creation of God, you will be more and more aware of God’s fullness in you.
The fullness of God in Christ
Interestingly enough, Paul mentions the fullness of God in his letter to the Colossians as well. Referring to Christ, he says,
For in him [Christ] dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Colossians 2:9 KJV
First let me say, the word Godhead, is an interesting word. It’s used in the KJV and some other translations, but in more modern Bibles, it’s simply translated as the divine nature or divinity of God.
And then there’s the word body. Some Bibles translate the word bodily as “in a human body.” NLT
But some Bible scholars also see this word in a more spiritual way. Just as Paul talks about the body of Christ, not referring to the physical body of Jesus, but the body, or community, of those who believe in Christ, the phrase “bodily” is also seen to mean “the exalted spiritual body, visible only to the inhabitants of heaven .” (blueletterbible.org)
I mean, think about it. All the infinite nature of God could not fit inside the physical body of Jesus. The body of Christ is so much more than Jesus’s physique. Christ is the embodiment of, or the full representation of, God’s nature.
This is one of those times when human words, however well chosen, try to convey a deeper spiritual meaning but sometimes it’s like looking through a glass darkly. We do the best we can to describe a spiritual idea, but the real meaning comes, not just from words, but as a revelation from God.
As members of the body of Christ, we are filled with the fullness of God
The fact that the fullness of God dwells in Christ bodily and that God’s fullness dwells in all of us collectively, is really two ways of saying basically the same thing.
On several occasions Paul refers to the body of Christ as the church. That’s us. Because we are members of the body of Christ, who is filled with all the fullness of God, we are also filled with God’s fullness.
It takes spiritual revelation by the Holy Spirit to become aware of our place in the body of Christ. It takes humility to accept our “new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.” And it is possible to begin accepting this as true.
It’s time right now to put off any lingering sense of identifying yourself with your sins or the mistakes you’ve made. The reason you can put off this sinful nature is because it’s not who you really are.
You are a new creation
Paul declares this great and eternal truth for all ages when he writes
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things [that includes you] have become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17 NKJV
Christ has disposed of your sinful nature. Don’t go get it out of the trash heap.
The Holy Spirit constantly reveals your true identity as a child of God.
And you are able to put on, you are putting on, you have put on, and can accept your new self, your true self, “your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.”
And right this moment, spiritually, you are filled with the fullness of God.
Photo credit: stockcake.com
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James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and podcaster. He conducts Bible workshops online and in person. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by embracing the mindset of Christ in daily life. Contact him here.
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Bible References
Ephesians 3:16-21 NIV
16 I pray that out of his [God’s] glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
18 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,
19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,
21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Matthew 6:33 CSB
33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.
Ephesians 4:22-24 NIV
22 throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception.
23 Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes.
24 Put on your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.
Ephesians 4:23 KJV
23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;
Colossians 2:9 KJV
9 For in him [Christ] dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.
2 Corinthians 5:17 NKJV
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
