Who Completes You?

July 12, 2015

It came almost as an afterthought and moved quickly into a place of priority. Pastor Joe had asked me to preach while he was on vacation, and as I thought about it, it occurred to me that his series on marriage needed one last sermon to bring it closure. The church today is usually geared towards family life, which is a good thing given the state of the family in our culture today. But that emphasis creates a particular problem: our society is increasingly populated by single people--the never married and the formerly married, some of whom are hoping to enter the ranks (witness the recent Supreme Court decision granting marriage rights to the homosexual community), and many who have no desire to ever be limited by marriage. This means that the Christian community and the secular crowd are often inhabiting vastly different
worlds. I thought it would be helpful to speak to the single people among us, so that is what I did.

I had developed my outline and knew where I wanted the sermon to go when I remembered a snippet of a Bible verse that hit the bullseye for me. The outline was simple: God's plan for single people is to find their identity in Christ, not in any other relationship, to live a life of holiness and purity, and to experience the grace that enables them to live out the calling of God upon their lives. It really is no different from God's plan for any of us; it just plays out a bit differently. It was at the first point that the snippet of Scripture popped into my head.

Colossians 2:10 says, "You are complete in Him..." For me, this is the foundation for life itself. Marrying Linda 45 years ago didn't complete me; only Jesus Christ can do that. She complements me, but even thought I might feel it and certainly don't want to test it, I would not be half a person without her. If I look to her to complete me; to fulfill in me that which only Christ can do, I will be sorely disappointed. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot do it. And if she looks to me to be a complete person, she will be sadly mistaken. I am not God, and cannot fill that role for her. Both of us are complete in Jesus Christ. So is the single person. We don't need someone else to be complete persons. We are made complete in Jesus Christ. If more people understood this, they would be much more content in life, not looking to some other human being to supply that which only God can give. Tonight I am grateful for my wife of 45 years for how she complements me, balancing my reserve and introvertedness with her love for people. I am even more grateful to have learned long ago not to expect her to do for me what only Christ can do. Neither of us puts the other in that impossible position of being expected to provide what we do not have the capacity to offer, which frees us to give to each other the best of who we are, because we know who we are in Christ.