Colossians 2:9-10 “ For in him dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily, and you share in this fullness in him, who is the head of every principality and power.” This episode talks about how we struggle to believe that we are whole. I talk about many reasons why we find it hard to believe we are whole. Then I talk about why we are whole, what makes us whole. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
I Am Whole
Colossians 2:9-10 “ For in him dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily, and you share in this fullness in him, who is the head of every principality and power.”
This episode will conclude our “I am who God says I am” series. I am whole is a struggle for many to believe. We have all sinned before, we all sin frequently probably. It can be easy for us to think that sin makes us less than. Especially if we have had a really difficult past. Maybe we have had a lot of relationships in the past and we didn’t show up as our best selves in them. Maybe we haven’t had a lot of relationships, but we have slept with a lot of other people. I think many people in this society feel used. I think we feel used by the other sex, used by our bosses, and used by big companies to sell more products. There is just this brokenness instead of the feeling that we are whole.
What just popped into my mind was all the teenagers right now and how easy it is to feel broken when you are a teen. You don’t look the right way, your hair isn’t perfect, your clothes aren’t perfect. Life can be really hard when you are young. A therapist told me the other day that 15 was the most volatile age for emotions. At this age, you feel your emotions more intensely than you ever will again. Our minds are so easily persuaded by the enemy. Why is it so much easier to believe the negative than it is to believe the positive?
I read a great article about this called, “Finding Spiritual Wholeness" by Leanne Payne. Click Here for the article. I recommend you read the whole thing. What Leanne was talking about in this article is that God is perfectly whole and we are made in his likeness and image. She said, “When “sin” (That which is against God’s character) entered the world, so did our brokenness, along with our broken ideas about how we view ourselves, God, and others. There is an intuitive knowledge of our personal brokenness that we are constantly attempting to fix, deny or protect.” Isn’t this so true? We are always trying to fix, deny or protect our brokenness.
You might be wondering why anyone would want to protect their brokenness. I have talked with plenty of people who want to protect their brokenness because they have become comfortable with that brokenness. They have lived with that brokenness so they have come to identify as a broken person. Changing that image would be hard and not something they believe they can do. One thing we don’t realize is that life is hard. Yes, it is hard to change and yet, isn’t living a sinful life also hard? Eating healthy can be hard, yet isn’t being overweight and struggling to get around hard too? Standing up to our loved ones and putting boundaries in place is hard, yet so is living without those boundaries in place. Quitting vaping is hard, yet so is living life addicted to nicotine and not being able to concentrate because you are thinking about the next time when you will get to hit your vape.
The article I read talked about how sin distorts how we look at things. Here are a few examples she gave:
Sin perverts our perception of God:
God is angry with me - “He hates my sin, he must hate me.”
God is disgusted with me - "I’m too dirty and damaged for Him to accept me”
God is distant from me - “Why would he want to be with me when I’m like this?”
God is unfair - “This is just one big setup...I couldn’t stop if I tried.”
God is unhappy - “All the fun things are off limits!”
Sin warps our self-perception:
We become foolishly great in our own eyes when we hide from the reality of our sin, like the emperor with no clothes.
We become worth - less in our own eyes when we become hyper-focused on our sins.
Sin degrades or elevates (to unhealthy levels) our perception of others:
We tend to do the same thing with other people that we do with ourselves - We make them out to be greater or less than we are. We serve them like gods or treat them like dogs.
Payne goes on to say, "Sin brings disintegration of self while righteousness (living congruently with the character of God) brings integration of self or spiritual wholeness. This is one reason God hates sin so much - He doesn’t want our disintegration because He loves us! It must be said that any and all “righteous living” apart from God doesn’t get us to wholeness, it gets us to self-righteousness - a horrible dis-ease that many Christians live with, and perpetrate on others.”
Now that we have talked about why we think we are not whole, let's look at what makes us whole. Do our actions determine if we are whole? Nope! Payne says, “Spiritual wholeness is not dependent on our actions but on an acceptance of God’s acting on our part in the life/death/resurrection of Christ. Because of our faith in Christ and what He’s done on our behalf, God can pronounce us whole and, remain a just God even though we often go on acting broken.” Jesus died to make us whole again. He took our sins to the cross with Him. We are no longer broken. Yes, we still act like we are broken at times yet God has redeemed us and made us whole.
So, if God has redeemed us and made us whole, why don’t we feel whole? I think we don’t feel whole because we struggle to believe that He can forgive us for what we have done. We don’t accept that forgiveness for ourselves. We will be the first ones to convince a friend or loved one that Jesus loves and forgives ALL their sins, we just struggle to believe He will do it for us. I talked with a woman recently who had been to confession about a time in her life when she wasn’t proud of how she was living. Even though she had been to confession the enemy was still not letting her move past it. She kept thinking about it and believing that she was her past mistakes. She was believing that she was stuck in her past. Things won’t change because she is still that person. She wasn’t believing in the healing that took place during confession.
So many of us do this same thing. We believe we are our past mistakes. We believe if we did it once we will do it again. We struggle to believe things will change and we struggle to believe that God could forgive us. To reiterate what the author of the article said, “Spiritual wholeness is not dependent on our actions but on an acceptance of God’s acting on our part in the life/death/resurrection of Christ.” It is not our actions that make us whole it was Jesus’ actions. Jesus knew when He decided to die on that cross for us that we would keep sinning. He didn’t die for us because we were blameless or because He knew we were going to stop sinning. He died for us to make us whole and His sacrifice was complete.
The verse above says, “ For in him dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily, and you share in this fullness in him, who is the head of every principality and power.” We were made in the likeness and image of God. We share in the fullness of Him. However, when sin entered the world, so did our brokenness. God sent His only son to repair that. He died on the cross to make us whole, let’s live our lives in honor of that. Let’s live into this truth that we are whole. We are no longer broken, Christ made us whole!
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, we love you and we thank you for giving us your son to die on the cross so we could be made whole. Help us to live in that wholeness Lord. Help us to accept your forgiveness and help us make it more about you than about us. Help us to stop listening to the enemy. Help us to be strong enough to reject his stupid lies. Open our eyes to his lies and give us the strength to renounce them and take away any authority they have. Lord, when we believe the lies, we empower the liar. We are done empowering the liar Lord. We want you to be the only one that has any power in our lives. We love you Lord and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. Next week I will be on vacation with my family. I am still planning to post each day, however, they may not be consistent with the time of day. If you want to listen and a new one is not posted yet it might be a great opportunity to listen to one of the old ones. What I like to do is randomly select one of the old ones and it always ends up being exactly what I needed to hear for that day. I look forward to meeting you here again on Monday. Remember, Jesus loves you, and so do I! Have a blessed weekend!