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1. The Church is Christ's fulness, because it has grown out of Christ, and He has increased outwards so as to form the Church. He has developed into it. He has 'expanded into it; as a seed grows into a tree with its branches. First, Christ fills the Church and each true believer with His Spirit, and Christ thus lives, by His Spirit, in each and all. The Spirit and Christ are one. Another view, secondly, is that presented in the words, "out of His fulness have we all received, and grace for grace." Faith is the instrument of receiving out of His fulness, or, the medium of communication. The Christian by faith receives a corresponding grace to every grace that was in Christ. And he is at length filled, according to his measure or capacity, out of Christ. But, thirdly, Christ imparts to the Church and to each believer all spiritual blessedness.

2. Let us now consider the idea of the Apostle in its other aspect. We have seen how the Church is the fulness of Christ, in the sense of its being the development, as it were, of the root, by which it grows up into a full body, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The other side of the idea is embodied in the thought that the Church fills up, completes, and perfects Christ. We must still contemplate Christ and His Church as one. He, in condescension, has taken it to be part of Himself, and, in this view, without it, He would be incomplete. So Paul in one place calls the Church "Christ" (1 Corinthians 12:12). The body is Christ according to this passage. It forms part of Him, and completes Him. We are thus led to consider all true Christians as necessary parts of what Christ Himself has chosen for His own body; and the whole Church of the redeemed, when gathered together, will, together with the Head, make one Christ.

(W. Alves, M. A.).

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KJV: Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.

WEB: which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.