In the final chapter of Colossians the apostle Paul alludes to a man named Epaphras who had a zealous desire that the believers within his locality would be ‘‘perfect and complete in all the will of God”. Col 4:12 It says that this Epaphras labored fervently in prayer hoping that full maturity would become a reality in the lives of those beloved brethren of Colossae, Laodicea and surrounding cities and towns.

We have this same “hope of Epaphras” for our readers. To grow into a ”perfect” and “complete” person in Christ is a wonderful ambition for any believer and its understanding, in purely spiritual terms, is not as difficult as people usually make it out to be. Epaphras worked in behalf of the believers who lived in Colossae, a fellowship of dedicated, earnest Christians, and for those who lived in Laodicea, a gathering which Christ scolded in Revelation for being “lukewarm” to the Truth, indifferent to spiritual perfection, happy with thinking they knew everything and that believed they were in need of nothing. They were over-confident, arrogant and prideful in their spiritual condition. It is no coincidence that this Epaphras was worried about these people, but also had hope for a wide range of believers because that is the way of the Holy Ghost in the Church. Epaphras and the Spirit issue the invitation to be ”perfect” and ”complete” to any and all, in any part or church of the greater Church; to any who can hear the call.

As Epaphras was led of the Spirit to issue the call, so we also are led to issue the same challenge. The following is to be seen as an essential part of the journey to Brideship; stating the case for the necessity of perfection in Christ, especially if a saint is to be reckoned as the espoused bride of Christ and positioned to be accounted worthy to escape all those things that are falling upon the earth in these last days. The big hope is to be raptured into the waiting arms of Jesus. The sum of this section amounts to an exhortation to believe in the possibility of spiritual perfection and a fervent invitation to strive for it in one’s personal walk with the Lord.

Why is it so hard…
For the faithful to believe that the power of Jesus Christ can transform them into perfect and complete Christians? Most Christians remain snagged in erroneous and worldly notions of perfection and then incredibly conclude that the one and only place where it is impossible to be perfect in conduct and life is in the economy of God? It is impossible for God to perfect and bring to completion a disciple.

Certainly, poor teaching is a major reason for the brethren’s shallow, limited idea about God’s means of perfecting and completing the saints. In the end each person will shoulder the responsibility for their own walk of faith, and everything hinges around a personal relationship with the Lord and how carefully it has been nurtured and preserved. Completion is a matter of yielding to the Trinity and abiding in God’s love; perfection is a matter of our close and communicative personal relationship with Him through the living Spirit of God within us. While it is true that God is the only perfect and good One and Man is very, very far from it; it is true that God also does miracles. When one becomes born-again they get a new nature, the old heart of stone, deaf to God’s voice, is replaced by a heart of flesh. That individual is no longer a mere mortal for they now have eternal life dwelling with and in their spirit. That person now lives in a brilliant new realm, one brimming with the promise of living a life that can be pleasing to God.  

Hear God’s Word And Do It…
Since God dwells in the born-again heart, that heart has something perfect in it – which is “Christ in us”. And that, brothers and sisters, is the key to the mystery of being perfect before God. To want this indwelling of God to OVERTAKE US AND GROW TO PERFECTION is to desire to be as perfect as a Christian can be. We find it by dying to ourselves and letting the Holy Ghost form Christ in us. Perfection in Christ is really just that simple. We must shed our preoccupation with natural notions of perfection; they mean nothing in the spiritual realm. Perfect before God has nothing to do with our limitations, poor judgement, assessments, or decisions. Perfection before God has to do with our willingness to hear God’s word and do it.

The Christian who would be perfect must learn to recede in ego and will, and let the influence of God’s Spirit increase and swell. He must learn the sound of God’s voice in his heart and seek to be obedient to that voice. Remember when Jesus was informed that his mother and brethren waited outside to see him he turned to his disciples, spread His hands over the room, and said, “My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God and do it.” Luke 8:21 Jesus repeatedly testified that he came not to do his own will, but the will of his Father in heaven which sent him. That testimony is Christ’s perfection, and is his disciples’ perfection – we hear God and obey. Let’s not make it more complicated than it is. Seek to hear his voice. Be obedient. Do what God directs. Find out what God is hoping for. There is a faith which God has, seek to conform to that faith.

How Do I Know God’s Will?…
So then the inevitable questions rise to the surface. How can I hear God’s voice? How can I know his will? Where do I get the power to resist temptation, be freed of myself and become obedient to God’s desires? I know my flesh is weak. How do I discover what He has faith for?  

That is where being complete comes in. Being complete merges the two: one must seek His will and once discovered must then walk in it. We must be willing to throw off the presumptions of our family traditions, our religious stereotype and get fully equipped for the work of “perfection”.

Just as God is three persons so Man’s completion in Christ is grounded in three critical spiritual experiences in God.

1. We must be born-again which means we must repent, accept Christ as Lord and Savior, and be fitted with a new heart, one with spiritual eyes and ears so we can see and hear Christ.
2. We must be baptized in the Holy Ghost: like a newborn babe we can see and hear, but we can not comprehend the meaning of anything. Just as maturity and experience is needed until a baby can understand the will of those who communicate with it. The new babe in Christ must be equipped with the means and power to communicate and comprehend what God is saying to him or her. To help us in our new world, God has sent the Holy Spirit to minister all sorts of power and gifts. We need to be empowered, showered, and baptized with the Holy Ghost by Jesus.
3. Water baptized: We have to get ourselves out of the way. For that God has provided the spectacle of water baptism which is a symbolic action of dying to ourselves and our distorted natural life, so that Christ may be raised up in us. This is a public profession of our desire to have God’s desires and hopes rule our lives as if we were “dead“.

This does not speak in respect to being saved from death and having a stake in eternal life with god, these matters are of a higher realm of perfection that not all believers with eternal life must advance to. These three acts: 1) accepting Christ, which is to be made a new creature; 2) being imbued with the power of the Holy Ghost; and 3) water baptism, which is the acting out of a desire to die to self so Christ may fully live in us are the highest which only some will experience. They give one a kind of completion that will enable us to go on to the sort of perfection that is not of the flesh, but is of the spirit. Just as there were apostles and offices of teachers and pastors etc., just as there are differences of glory in the stars, so there are differences and heights available to believers that are more than the requirements for salvation and getting out of here alive.

Though it is not critical to winning life eternal, some may we grow into a faithful servant of God “complete” and “perfect”. They are able to ‘put on the full armor of God‘ wherewith the complete Christian, as a spiritual soldier in Christ, fights the battles of faith. Through the power of Christ and the might of the Word of God we can be fully equipped to win the battles of life and of the Lord by spiritual means through His gifts and faith given to us.

“Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God …
   having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
   above all taking the shield of faith,  wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
   And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit”…Eph. 6:13-18 

Granted, most Christians never tap into the blessings of living “perfect” and “complete” before God and never become righteous soldiers in the Lord. This failure takes place for a variety of reasons; lack of faith, personal fears, resistance to the Holy Ghost, to name a few. The Christian remains imperfect and incomplete in his faith. Many, if not most, believers let themselves believe their imperfect walk with the Lord is the best that can be had. On the threshold of freedom and holiness, they stop, see that the price they must pay is yielding and dying to self, and never enter into that close relationship which leads to discipleship.

Call us cynical, but the prevailing resistance to the notion of a perfect and complete Christian is not from Scriptural influences, to the contrary, Scripture exhorts us to be perfect, full, victorious and complete. No, the prevailing attitude is because the Church desires to excuse its imperfections, tries to cover its blemishes, tries to rationalize its marriage with the world, tries to conceal its weakness to temptation by doing penance. The Church is intimidated by their own weakness when they should be freed by it. Once a person realizes that God will give the strength and infuse it in us when we concede to His Will, God, then, can provide the strength and the steadfastness we as if we were taking some sort of spiritual steroid that gives us a spiritual insight and power that is not of our own. We must be sensitive, attentive, faithful to His Word within our heart. It is by faith that we are ‘perfect’ not in the world’s eyes or in accord with its standard of perfection, but in God’s eyes we are perfect when we are walking by the faith for things which we have acquired from Him alone, when we walk in His strength which is provided for us by the Holy Spirit. The general Church is too quick to excuse its selfish presumptions of His will with a shrug, and a quizzical “after all we’re only human.” It often pays the price of living out needless struggles because what it wants and what God wants for them are two different things.  

If this remains confused, this matter of perfection, there are only two possibilities: 1) Accept an imperfect life in Christ and ignore Christ’s call to spiritual fitness and perfection or believe that, 2) Christ and the Scriptures are laying an unbelievable guilt trip on his friends and believers. Which is it? We the Church can not have it both ways.

The Bible says:

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Matt. 5:48
   “Be Holy as your father in Heaven is Holy.” and… “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” Heb 12:14

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Paul Considered It His Obligation As a Pastor…
to strive to bring together every person in his care to perfection. He told the saints at Colosse:

“We preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily.” Col 1:28

Scriptural Context – Colossians 1:21-29

“And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled.
   In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight:
   If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister;
   Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church:
   Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God;
   Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints:
   To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:
   Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus:
   Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily.”

EQUIPPING US COMPLETELY with The Three Baptisms that can make us whole in Christ!

1) Repentance – The Father draws us to Jesus John 6:44; “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” He does this that we might partake of the baptism of repentance, leading us to being born again, by showing us we need a Savior – Jesus. Jesus also set the example by partaking of John’s baptism in obedience to the Father, even though He did not need to repent, but we do. “John did baptize in the wilderness and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins”. Mark 1:4 Other citations are; Luke 3:3, Acts 13:24, Acts 19:4. When Jesus, in obedience to the Father, was baptized by John, they saw “the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him: and there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Matt 3:16-17

2) Water Baptism – When we choose to yield and be water baptized in the name of Jesus, we are testifying publicly to our desire to die to self and become more and more like Him. Once more we see Jesus as the central figure. By being baptized in His name and after His example of death and resurrection we have completed the three parts of that one baptism mentioned in Ephesians 4:5 “One Lord (Jesus) one faith (in Jesus), one baptism (3 parts, but all depend on Jesus)”, making it one, in the sense that He makes it all possible, for without Him none of the three parts can happen. Completion in Christ takes place by being immersed or baptized in the Father’s baptism of repentance, by being baptized in the name of Jesus and into a complete death and life in Him, and by being immersed in the Holy Ghost by Jesus. Again, I say completely furnished and able to go on unto perfection.

3) Baptism in the Holy Ghost – Jesus offers to baptize us in the Holy Ghost for He is the baptizer as John the Baptist announced in Matthew 3:2. He warned; “Repent ye for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He also prophesied in verse 11; “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, … He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” As we call on the Holy Ghost to possess us, or engulf us in God’s very Spirit, we can be sure that God’s Love, which is embodied in Jesus, will be faithful to baptize us. Mark 1:8/Luke 3:16/John 1:32-34 “And when the day of pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place… And they all were all filled (whelmed) with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Acts 2.: 1 & 4

[The reader may want to take a look at an article by Eloise Gardenier: The Three Baptisms.]