“Abolish!” It’s an active word. I scrap a drawing, chase the squirrels off the bird feeder, or shout “Stop! Stop!” to get the hose turned off before I get any wetter. In each case, I’ve abolished something. As a concrete and colorful word, “abolish” is quick to captivate our imaginations. Even so, thinking of “abolishing” is exactly the opposite of what the Lord Jesus tells us to do when he says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish. . . . I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17).
“Fulfill.” It’s not so easy to imagine. Yet it clearly serves as the focal point for the Lord’s teaching: “I have come to fulfill.” So what do we make of this word? When I hear “fulfill,” it’s usually in the context of duty—“I need to fulfill these requirements,” or “I have to fulfill my obligation.” But I think “fulfill” finds a more natural ring in statements like “This job is so fulfilling!” Here is a fulfillment of excitement, of joy. This fulfillment gives life, it engages our whole person, and it causes us to grow.
The fulfillment found in the Gospel is a fulfillment like this, and is much more too. It’s the fulfillment of grace, grace that breaks us out of the constraints we place on ourselves.
This fulfillment is daunting. It’s easy to look to Christ and say, “I could never be like that. That just isn’t who I am.” But instead of binding us to the self-images we create for ourselves, grace does something “far more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20); it conforms us to the Lord Jesus himself, making us children of God.
True happiness, true fulfillment, is found in being children of God. It’s fair to ask, “Will we lose a part of who we are? Will we be giving up on finding our own personal fulfillment?” But these fears of abolishment vanish like smoke in the face of the Gospel. “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
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