The Fullness of Life

"For from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace." (John 1:16)

"In our lives and churches today we don't have the gospel wrong, really. We just have it shallow. We see the gospel as the ABCs of salvation, but not the A to Z for all of life. We like that the gospel gets our sins forgiven and gives us a ticket to heaven, but we're not sure of its functionality in our lives every day. We're content to keep the gospel at an elementary level, assuming that we graduate from it, and the sad result is we thereby deny the 'grace upon grace.'The further into the gospel we go the bigger it gets. We can not wear it out. When Jesus came we got all of him. Not a bit of him was held back from us." -- Jared Wilson

We love the idea of living a full life, eating a full meal, or experiencing a full day. We're scared of one bit of our lives being empty so what do we do? We fill it with finite things that can never fill the infinite gap of eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). The gospel of Jesus Christ is so much bigger and so much more filling that we are seeing it as right now in our churches, in our bible studies, and in our day to day lives. We need a bigger, grandeur view of the Gospel.

"Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." (Isaiah 55:1)

In this passage, Isaiah compares the gospel of Jesus Christ to three different drinks that we use for all of life. In doing so he's announcing to the people, "the Gospel is everything we ever need and more." 

1.) Water (quenching your thirst)
When you are most thirsty, most desperate, and most dehydrated, its water that you want and nothing else.

2.) Milk (quenching your weakness)
When someone is grasping for life, you give them water. But when you want a little baby to grow day after day, you give it milk again and again. God is not just for emergencies and mountain peaks. He is for health, strength, and substantiation in the long haul. He invited you not only to come alive with water, but also to be stable and strong with milk.

3.) Wine (quenching your boredom)
Everyone wants to live and not die. No matter how serious, unemotional, and laid-back we may seem to others, there is a child inside everyone of us that God made for joy -- shouting, dancing, singing, playing, skipping, jumping, and laughing. God is not after your begrudging submission, but rather your joy in all of life.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? (Isaiah 55:2)

Why are we not full of the Gospel? We choose to spend our time trying to find fullness in the fleeting pleasures of this world that leave us far more emptier than we could ever imagine. We don't see God's "steadfast love as better than life" (Psalm 63:3) because the newest reality TV show is on, or UK plays at 9, or twitter is demanding all my attention right now. Listen to C.S. Lewis and the Word of God and come home to the fullness of life and the fountain of pleasures in God forevermore.


"Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. " (C.S. Lewis "The Weight of Glory)