[CynicalBear]

I guess you forgot this verse by the time you got down to verse 24.

Colossians 1:21 And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled 22 In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight:

Notice how He has reconciled through His flesh, not ours, that He might present us “holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight”. He did it all.

In verse 24 Paul was talking about “what is lacking” in the amount of suffering he had endured compared to what Christ endured. I didn’t miss anything but it seems you may have missed verse 21 and others like it.

[metmom]

Romans 8:1-4 1There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Romans 8:9-11 9You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

[Mad Dawg]

In verse 24 Paul was talking about “what is lacking” in the amount of suffering he had endured compared to what Christ endured

In your reading, "... what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ," means "what is lacking in MY {that is, Paul's] sufferings"? I construe it differently.

The Church (which,includes,the members, which is the fulness of the body of Christ, as Paul says in Ephesians, shares in the sufferings of Christ and in their merit, not at ALL on the Church's own toot, but because it is Christ's body, not its own.

Again the basic problem seems to lie in a difference over what we are saved TO.