Qualified

Colossians 1:12-14, Colossians 2:10, Hebrews 13:13-14

My daughter just finished 1st grade and she is so excited to be done with school. I asked her yesterday, “Sweetie, why should your school allow you to go into 2nd grade next year?”. She replied, “I have no idea”.

I said, “it is because you finished 1st grade that you are qualified to move on to second grade. Without going through 1st grade, there is no way you could go into 2nd grade; 1st grade is what makes you qualified or sufficient to enter 2nd grade”.

This word “qualified” is one that Paul uses in Colossians 1:12-14, he writes, “giving thanks  to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

Qualified. The word in greek means, “reaching the place of sufficiency and hence making someone qualified, i.e. able” .

The place of sufficiency that we sinners need to reach, Christ has reached for us ahead of time for us.

This place of sufficiency is God’s perfect holiness and righteousness, and God Himself has provided the means by which we have reached this exact qualification: Christ sinless life, atoning death and resurrection from the dead.

The amazing thing about this verb is the tense that it is written in: It is written in the Aorist. 

The aorist tense in greek represents not an ongoing process, but rather a past completed action. The completed action isn’t something from our perspective, rather, it is something from God’s perspective. 

To God, our salvation does not go up and down with our feelings, the world, or the strength of our faith. 

To, God, our salvation stays just as true and steady as Christ is true and steady.

Right now, we are as qualified for God’s presence as Jesus is, because we are “in Him”.

As God look’s over the duration of our lives, it isn’t our lives He is pleased with, rather it is Christ’s life He is pleased with.

Just as Christ is 100% righteous, we are 100% righteous. It is His life given us by the power of God, through the Holy Spirit, that we are made righteous, holy and sufficient both now and forever, “and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.” (Colossians 2:10)

If we are looking to see the strength of our salvation, the first place we ought to look is the worthiness of Christ; and the last place we are to look is our own goodness.

Truly Christ is where faith and freedom are found for all who come to Him no matter who they are and no matter what they have done.

The world, in its sinful rebellion against God, and prideful unrelenting unwillingness to worship our loving and gracious Lord have sealed their own eternal doom, by stubbornly standing on their own righteousness and morality.

May we not make the same foolish mistake. May we, as the writer of Hebrews has written, “go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.” (Hebrews 13:13-14)