In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ. (Colossians 2:9,10 NIV)
We have said that Christ is a heavenly
revelation, but Christ is also a heavenly fullness. If God has revealed His mind,
His thought in Christ; if all that God intended has been brought to us in a
personal revelation: God has followed that up by the fullest provision in Christ
for its realization and its attainment. So that every need of ours is supplied
according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. In Christ there is not only a
standard set, but every kind of provision for attaining to God’s standard. All
the secret resources of God to reach His end are there in Christ for us. If He
has come out with the mind of God in fullness, He has also come out with the
resources of God in fullness. All the fullness dwells in Him, and we are made full
in Him (Col. 2:9). God could never judge us at the end by His
standard of revelation if He had not made all provision for our realizing of
that standard....
God’s thought is centered in Christ in heaven, and God’s resources are centered in
Christ in heaven. That means that the Lord’s people in this dispensation are
essentially a heavenly people, and that means that it is quite impossible to
attain unto God’s thought or to know God’s resources in Christ until we are a
heavenly people. If in any way (and we are speaking to the Lord’s people now,
and speaking of the life which we would call the Christian life), or in any
measure we are
earthbound, it will be in that measure impossible to attain unto
God’s thought, and to know God’s resources. God only takes responsibility to
supply and to carry on that which is essentially heavenly, and in the measure in
which a thing is heavenly, and only in that measure (but surely in that
measure), God takes responsibility for it. If it is in any way linked with this
world, becoming a part of this world system, related to this earth, it has got
to take responsibility for itself to carry its own weight, to find its own
resources, to see its own way through.