Morning By Morning #28

…perfect in Christ.

Colossians 1:28

From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

When you search deeply within yourself, don’t you find a lack of perfection? Doesn’t every day of your life teach you that? Doesn’t every tear that trickles from your eyes and every harsh word that proceeds from your lips mutter, “Imperfection.” Too frequently you have had such a direct view into your own heart that it seems impossible to dream of even a moment of perfection in yourself.

Yet in the midst of this sad awareness of your own imperfection there is comfort for you—you are “perfect in Christ.” In God’s sight you are “complete in Christ” (Col. 1:28 NASB)—even now you are “accepted in the beloved” (Eph. 1:6 KJV).

Yet there is also a second perfection, still to come, which is guaranteed to all God’s children. Isn’t it a delight to look forward to the day when every stain of sin will be removed from believers—when we will be presented “without fault and with great joy” (Jude 24) before God’s throne, “without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Eph. 5:27). On that day Christ’s church will be so pure, even the eye of Omniscience will not detect a spot or blemish in her—so holy and glorious it will not stretch the truth in the least to say of us:

With my Savior’s garments on,
Holy as the Holy One.

Samuel Hart, 1845-?

Only then will we know, taste, and feel the happiness of the fullness of this short phrase: “Complete in Christ.” Not till then will we fully comprehend the heights and depths of the salvation of Jesus. Doesn’t your heart leap within you at this very thought? As dark as your soul may be, that day it will be “white as snow” (Isa. 1:18)—as filthy as you are, you will be clean.

What a miraculous salvation this is! Christ takes a mere worm and transforms it into an angel. He takes someone dark and deformed and makes him clean and matchless in His glory, without peer in His beauty, and fit to be the companion of seraphim.

“O my soul” (Ps. 103:1), stand and admire this blessed truth—“perfect in Christ.”

From the pen of Jim Reimann:

Clean! If only we could see ourselves through the eyes of our precious Savior, who said, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you” (John 15:3). Yet there are examples in the Scriptures of men who had the Lord’s perspective. David declared, “The LORD has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in his sight” (2 Sam. 22:25).

And Job once said, “My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes” (Job 11:4 ESV), for the Lord had said of him, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8).

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph. 1:3-4).