Christians thrive in the knowledge that they are destined for a home with God. They are God’s workmanship, who while they wait, are instruments in His hands.
Along with all creation believers live and breathe and have their being as God ordains. It is because life and creation are not of themselves that they give glory and thanks to God.
However, countless millions of people, though seeing what believers see, refuse to acknowledge that it is of God, and convince themselves that their soul’s destiny is in their own hands.
It is only those who are born of the water and the Spirit who will spend eternity with God. The repentant sinner is “baptised into Christ” (Romans 6:3), “and in Christ you have been brought to fullness” (Colossians 2:10).
The Divine Christ, who “is the head over every power and authority” (Colossians 2:10), has no needs that require external input; He is all-sufficient.
It is man’s way to look to his own competence. He glories in his abilities to amass wealth and the attention of others. But all the while he ignores the emptiness of his soul.
The quest to prove eternal self-sufficiency has led kings, emperors, and pharaohs to pack their tombs with treasures for the next world. Treasures that testify to their own inability to bring fulfilment on that side or this.
The apostle Paul saw fulfilment in Christ alone. Even in his ministry he did not count anything as having come from himself. He saw himself as yet another earthen vessel “showing that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).
Paul told the Corinthian brethren, who along with all the churches that he and the other evangelists had planted, that everything was of God, not of them:
“Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5).
It was because of this that they were Strong and Courageous.
John Staiger