4.3 Filled with God
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
And to know even more the surpassing knowledge of the love of Christ, that you might be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19).
Filled with all the fulness of God! What do you do with a word like this? The primary response is to scoff with some form of the serpent’s words: Did God really say that? Many, reading these words, will respond with, “You can be, if you make yourself better by some form of human performance, such as ‘hear and obey,’ or ‘keep the law,’ or ‘try your best.’”
But you have learned only one response to every word God speaks – Let it be to me according to Your Word – and then believing we have received.
Life Is Knowing. If God is God, then God is All Here Now and Personal in every moment of time and in every point of space. If God is God, then ALL of God in Person has to fill every particle of all creation and every created entity in fullness. That is not the issue. The issue is that no one knows.
Life is not “God” per se; life is knowing God. And knowing comes into us only through faith, only through our receiving into ourselves every word God speaks as Christ our life. The fact that you are filled with all the fullness of God, then, in itself, means nothing and changes nothing – for you (except that you would not exist otherwise). But knowing God filling you full is something entirely different.
Let It Be to Me. How do you KNOW that you are filled with all of God? The answer to that question will increase forever. But we do know exactly where we must start – Let it be to me according to Your word.
Speak these words out loud. “Father, You say that I am filled with all the fullness of Your Being and Person. I ask, Father, that You fulfill this Word in me through and as the Lord Jesus alive inside my heart. I ask that You cause me to know all that You mean by these words of filling me with all that You are. And Father, I believe and know that I have received all that I ask. From this moment forward, I will rejoice in knowing that I am filled with all of Your fullness.”
God “Far Away.” Now, some might think, “Hey, God is God and I’m just a tiny human, how on earth could I contain inside my being all that is God in Person?” Others might think, “I make mistakes all the time. I sometimes do wicked and hurtful things. God is perfect. If God were filling me full, then I would do thus and so—. And because I am not doing thus and so —, then it is clear to me that I am not filled with God.”
Do you see how the evil one uses the sight of the eyes and the judgment of the human to tempt people to call God a liar? God says, “You are filled with all of My fulness.” The serpent says, “You can be filled with God, yes, but first you must —.” All such thinking ends in one horrific place only – “God is far away from me.”
The Door. Remember that every word God speaks, including this biggest statement ever uttered in creation, comes into you only through your faith, to become Jesus, that Word fulfilled, alive inside your heart. It’s up to Jesus to make the Word God speaks to be what it is; your part is to believe in Him.
But God always places a door between Himself and all who approach Him. A door serves two very different purposes. First, a door swings wide open to welcome in friends and family, and second, a door stays locked shut to keep false intruders out. God’s door is always faith in His Word, the Lord Jesus.
What Is Inside of You? You will know what God means by what He says, and especially, what God means by filling you full with all of His fulness in Person, only as you first believe that He is telling you the truth.
Having asked God to fulfill His Word as Jesus in your heart, having believed that you have already received all that you ask, consider, now, the first obvious question. What is inside of you? You know who – the Father through Jesus. What you don’t know is what God is. God is Spirit, yes, but we have no idea what Spirit is. God is love, yes, but we have no idea what love is.
Defining God and Man. What is inside of you? And even more, what are you that God fills you full? John said, in 1 John 3:2, that we do not know what we are. So, if we do not know what Spirit is, if we do not know what Love is, what do we know? We know a Man. – He that has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:9).
Okay, we know what a Man is, or, at least we think we do. What is God’s definition of a Man? – the likeness and image of God (Genesis 1:26). It is God who has placed this circular definition before us. To know what God is, we must look at a Man. To know what a Man is, we must look at God.
Man is the appearance of God in creation; humans are what God “looks like.”
Showing Us the Father. God did not give us this circular definition to spin us in circles, however, but that we might know God through Jesus Sent into the only place we can know Him – in our own human hearts of flesh filled with Jesus.
Remember what Jesus told His disciples just before Gethsemane? – These things I have spoken to you in figurative language; but the time is coming when… I will tell you plainly about the Father (John 16:25). Then Jesus stopped talking, that is, Jesus showed us plainly who and what God is by carrying us every step of the way through death and into life. It is from that picture, then, of Jesus walking the path of the Atonement, through which we are able to describe God.
A Description of God. Here is my own description of God; this is the One I know.
– God always reveals Himself through weakness, swallowing up into Himself all that we are including our sin and rebellion, becoming us in our present state and limiting Himself by our weakness. Thus, carrying us inside Himself, stumbling and falling along the way, He arises out of death into life, ascending on high, and we inside of Him. –
The God who fills you full with all of Himself in Person is the God who carries you in weakness, embedded utterly in love. By this we know Love – because Jesus laid down His life for us (1 John 3:16). By this we know God – as we look out through Jesus’ eyes, stumbling along the way, carried utterly by Father.
Filled with All Fulness. What fills you full? “Filled” means every particle of who and what you are, spirit, soul, and body. “All” means all. There is not a particle, a dimension, a realm, a place, a character trait, a quality that is God that is not also IN you, filling every particle of you as you. All of God. Love. The Holy of the Throne.
The “Fullness” of God. Fullness is billowing, it is exploding-ness, it is above and beyond. All of infinity is inside of you, yes, but infinity in FULLNESS, omnipresence in fullness, omnipotence in fullness, eternality in fullness, holiness in fullness, love in fullness, light in fullness, exploding, billowing, rushing mighty rivers of God, all of Him inside of you, all of Him flowing out from you.
Because I Want To. For over ten years, now, most every night when I awake, and often during the day, I look at myself, at my heart, and I say, in one form or another – “Father, You fill me full with all that You are. You are close, Father; You are part of me.”
I have no desire to “control” God; any such nonsense has been stripped from me over years of His grip upon my life. I want to know Him. I want Father to be in me and I want me to be in Father. I want to walk together with God in every step.
What proof do I have that God fills me with all that He is? My proof is my faith in what God speaks. And why do I INSIST on believing such a thing? Because I want to; because I would not be found anywhere else.
Three More Parts of Knowing Jesus. Let’s sum up the next three parts of knowing Jesus.
10. Heaven and earth are part of one another, one place together. Heavenly things and earthly things act upon each other continuously. All created things exist only inside the Spirit and the Knowing of God. What appears in creation may not look to us like the substance out from which it comes.
11. God created humans weak for His purposes. – That the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. For that reason, God embeds our human weakness and every particle of our lives inside of His love, rooted and grounded in love.
12. God created humans to be filled with all of Himself. Man is created to contain God; man is custom made to fit God; man is what God looks like when He appears inside heaven/earth.