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To: markomalley

Those definitions are applicable.

Remember though, Col 1:24 is referencing Paul’s sufferings, not his sacrifice.

In God’s Plan, each of us may have a different portion in His Plan.

Suffering is used in several ways by God in His Plan for us.

Similar to children, suffering is used to gain or redirect our attention, the direction of our thinking. In this fashion it might be used for discipline if we are out of fellowship.

Even while we remain in fellowship with Him, suffering might be used to discipline us in the application and growth and perseverance of faith in Him. It might be used as a method of evidence testing, so that we might provide evidence to others’ presence of how remaining in faith through Him is a winning solution in all problems.

Our Lord Christ Jesus is also a human being with a human spirit, while He is also God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The suffering we experience in His Plan prepares us to perform per His Plan and where we succeed in the performance of good work through faith in Him (not dead works independent of faith through Him), then He is free to reward us at the bema seat judgment those rewards which were predestined and made in eternity past for us.

Our Lord and Savior provided the Perfect Sacrifice in His blood on the Cross, but He didn’t experience eveery type of human suffering we might experience, because as the second Adam, He didn’t have to experience all forms of suffering in order to still provide the Perfect Sacrifice to redeem us, reconciling man to God and propitiating His wrath in the case of all sin of humanity.

Meanwhile, there may be other suffering in the body, the church, which develops His body in all testing of things God wishes to show all present to glorify the Son.

While salvation may be spoken of in three tenses in Scripture, a past, present, and future tense, referring to how we have been saved from the consequence of our spiritual death from original sin, the present tense of freeing us from the slave market of sin, allowing us to continue to have fellowship with Him, while we are still sinners prior to the first death, and in a future tense, saving us from the consequences of sin in the body and providing us a resurrected body and with eternal life; we nonetheless continue to grow, just as Jesus Christ grew as a human being in His mind, also undergoing different forms of suffering and testing in our lives prior to the first death.

These are fabulous Scriptures in studying soteriology and the work of God the Holy Spirit in this Church Age prior to our eternal state.


5,958 posted on 01/22/2010 9:06:23 PM PST by Cvengr (Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)
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To: Cvengr
Remember though, Col 1:24 is referencing Paul’s sufferings, not his sacrifice.

That is a very orthodox Catholic thought.

In God’s Plan, each of us may have a different portion in His Plan.

True statement. As for myself, I consider the deeper ramifications to the "one body" St. Paul describes in 1 Cor 12 when pondering Col 1:24.

6,029 posted on 01/23/2010 4:13:05 AM PST by markomalley (Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus)
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