Are You Incomplete?

By Tammy Lacock

Warren lays down Paul’s gospel of Christ in the hopes that believers will fully grasp exactly what happens to us in that moment we believe. Only by God’s grace, our sin-natures were literally uprooted and another life, the Spirit of Christ, was planted in our very spirits, making us one spirit (1 Corinthians 6:7). This is what it means to be born again.

In fact, Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:4 that it was already in God’s mind before the foundation of the world for us to be in Christ:

“According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.”

Christ’s death (“the lamb slain,” 1 Peter 1:19-20) and our rebirth in Christ were both in God’s plan before the foundation of the world. There is not one without the other. Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection ushered in grace, a brand-new gospel revealed only to Paul. This grace is Christ as our new life.

Paul’s gospel of grace is one of completion (Colossians 2:10). Before we were born again in Christ, we were incomplete. Now that God’s plan of Christ literally living in every believer has been finished by the Cross, we are finally free to be exactly who God created us to be. Paul’s letters reveal the battle in his mind of burying his old self and mindset and knowing his new risen life now in Christ. He wanted nothing more than to know Him, the Christ that now breathes his very breath.

Now that we are complete in Christ, the Holy Spirit will comfort and teach us of our new life in Him. We no longer live, Christ is our new life (Galatians 2:20), all of us one body in Him (1 Corinthians 12:12-14). Now is our chance to experience His Peace, resting only in Him as the one who now operates in us. No longer under the power of Satan, sin, and the law, we are completely free knowing who we are now in Christ. We live and move in Christ now. This is the abundant life Jesus spoke about when He said, “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

Paul reveals this to us in the hopes that we, too, seek to intimately know the Christ living in each of us and experience His oneness in our unique expressions of Him.