The Fully Alive Believer — What Irenaeus Knew That We Have Forgotten

Based on John 10:10 — “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, gave us one of the most quoted and least understood sentences in the history of Christian theology:

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

We quote it on Instagram. We put it in book introductions. We use it to justify our interest in creative work and physical health and personal flourishing. And in doing so, we have almost entirely missed what Irenaeus actually meant — which is far more radical, far more demanding, and far more glorious than any of our domesticated uses of it.

For Irenaeus, the fully alive human being was not the person who had achieved their potential or maximized their gifts or found their best life. The fully alive human being was the person in whom the life of God Himself was most fully present and most fully expressed — the person who had been so thoroughly formed by the Spirit, so genuinely transformed by the grace of the new creation, so completely inhabited by the life of the One who said I am the resurrection and the life, that the life of God was visible in them in the most ordinary, daily, embodied, fully human dimensions of their existence.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive — fully alive with the life of Christ, expressed through the specific, irreplaceable, fully human vessel of a particular person in a particular place at a particular moment in history.

That is what John 10:10 is describing. Not a comfortable life. Not a successful life. Not even a spiritually impressive life.

A life that is genuinely, thoroughly, overflowingly full — with the specific life that only the God who invented life can give.

Jesus does not say “I have come that they may have a good life” or “a meaningful life” or even “a spiritual life.”

He says life — zōē in Greek, the deepest, most comprehensive, most genuinely alive quality of existence available to a human being. The same word used in John 17:3 for eternal life — not future-tense life after death, but the quality of life that comes from genuinely knowing the God who is life itself.

And He says it to the full — perissōs, abundantly, extravagantly, beyond what is merely sufficient, overflowing beyond the normal measure. Not barely alive. Fully alive. Extravagantly alive. Alive with a quality and a depth and an overflow that goes beyond what human existence, on its own terms, can produce or sustain.

This is the vision behind every article in this series. The Lifechoicely framework exists to serve this vision — not to produce religious performance or spiritual achievement, but to create the conditions in which genuine, full, abundant life can take root and grow in the specific, ordinary, daily reality of actual human beings.

John Eldredge has written more helpfully about this vision than anyone else in my reading life.

In Waking the Dead, he argues that the central problem of contemporary Christianity is not that we believe too much but that we expect too little — that we have settled for a version of the Christian life that is safe, manageable, and thoroughly tame, when Jesus was promising something wild and deep and genuinely alive.

“We have,” he writes, “a more cautious vision of the Christian life than Jesus did. Jesus said He came to bring life — abundant, full, overflowing life. We have translated that into a life of modest spiritual improvement, responsible church attendance, and the careful avoidance of obvious sin. Those things are not bad. But they are not what Jesus had in mind. What He had in mind was the recovery of the full humanity that was lost in the fall — the genuine, joyful, deeply loving, fully present, spiritually alive human being that God originally designed and that redemption is in the process of restoring” (Waking the Dead, p. 37, John Eldredge).

The recovery of the full humanity that was lost in the fall.

That is the scope of what Jesus came to give. Not a religious supplement to a half-alive human existence. The recovery and restoration of the full, genuine, deeply human aliveness that God designed and that the fall diminished — and that the new creation, in Christ, is in the process of restoring from the inside out.

Graham Cooke describes the fully alive believer in terms of what he calls “the magnificent obsession” — the single, consuming, joy-filled pursuit of knowing God that becomes the organizing principle of an entire life.

“The person who is fully alive in Christ,” he writes, “is not the person who has achieved the most or produced the most or disciplined themselves the most. They are the person who has been most thoroughly captured by the magnificence of God — who has seen enough of His goodness, His beauty, His power, His love, to be genuinely, joyfully, irrevocably obsessed. That obsession is not a burden. It is the most liberating thing that can happen to a human being — to

be so thoroughly captured by Someone so infinitely worth being captured by that everything else falls into its proper place naturally, effortlessly, as the inevitable consequence of having found the one thing worth organizing a life around” (Being with God, p. 171, Graham Cooke).

The one thing worth organizing a life around.

That is the fully alive believer. Not the most religiously productive. Not the most theologically sophisticated. Not the most disciplined or the most gifted or the most visibly fruitful. The most thoroughly captured — by the beauty, the goodness, the inexhaustible depth of a God who is always already more than anything we have yet discovered about Him.

And that capture — that magnificent obsession — produces, as its natural overflow, every other quality of the fully alive life. The love that stays in the room. The patience that outlasts the slow seasons. The joy that persists through suffering. The hope that does not disappoint. The mission that flows from fullness rather than obligation. The legacy that transmits life rather than merely information.

All of it — every dimension of the inside-out life — is the fruit of the one thing. Being genuinely, deeply, increasingly captured by the God who came to give life and give it to the full.

Bob Hamp describes the fully alive believer as the ultimate evidence of genuine transformation — the person whose interior renovation has progressed far enough that the life of Christ is visible in the most ordinary dimensions of their daily existence.

Not in their theological positions. Not in their ministry accomplishments. In the quality of their presence — the attentiveness, the warmth, the security, the genuine interest in other people that flows from a person who is no longer preoccupied with managing their own inadequacy or performing their own acceptability.

“The fully alive believer,” Hamp writes, “is the most fully human person in the room. Not the most religious. Not the most morally rigorous. The most genuinely present, the most genuinely loving, the most genuinely free — because the interior renovation that Christ has been doing in them has progressively freed them from the self-preoccupation that diminishes genuine humanity, and filled them with the self-giving love that expresses genuine divinity. They are, in the most literal sense, becoming what Irenaeus described — a human being fully alive with the life of God” (Think Differently, Live Differently, p. 463, Bob Hamp).

The most fully human person in the room.

That is the destination the inside-out life is moving toward. Not a more spiritual version of you — a more fully human version of you. The version that God designed before the fall corrupted the image. The version that Christ came to restore. The version that the Spirit is patiently, persistently, from-the-inside-out forming in every believer who remains genuinely, consistently, expectantly available to the process.

Frank Viola grounds the fully alive vision in the eternal purpose of God that he traces from before creation to the new Jerusalem.

God’s dream, from the very beginning, was a humanity that was fully alive with His own life — bearers of His image, expressers of His nature, living demonstrations in the physical world of the quality of love and joy and creativity and relationship that characterizes the eternal God who made them.

The fall interrupted that dream. Redemption restores it. And the church — the community of new creations, being formed from the inside out, carrying the life of Christ in ordinary human vessels — is the present-tense evidence that the dream is being fulfilled.

“The fully alive believer,” Viola writes, “is not an anomaly or a spiritual celebrity. They are the normal Christian — the person who is simply living the life that every believer was designed to live, expressing the Christ who lives in every believer, carrying the fullness that is available to every person who is in Christ. The tragedy is not that this life is rare. The tragedy is that we have accepted its rarity as normal, when it was always meant to be the standard” (From Eternity to Here, p. 334, Frank Viola).

Accepted its rarity as normal, when it was always meant to be the standard.

That is the indictment and the invitation in a single sentence. We have settled. We have accepted a diminished version of the Christian life — safe, manageable, spiritually modest — when Jesus was promising something extravagant and wild and genuinely, fully, overflowingly alive.

The Lifechoicely framework exists to refuse that settlement. To say — with every tool, every journal prompt, every identity declaration, every community practice, every article in this series — that the fully alive life is not reserved for spiritual celebrities or theological prodigies or people with extraordinary gifts and extraordinary circumstances.

It is for you. Right now. In the ordinary, unglamorous, beautiful reality of your specific, irreplaceable, God-designed life.

I want to tell you something that I believe with everything in me.

The 14-year-old who sat on a farm crying without knowing why — he was looking for this. For the fully alive life. For the God who invented life and who offers it extravagantly and without condition to anyone who will come with open hands and stay long enough to receive it.

I have not arrived. I am not the fully alive believer in some completed, nothing-left-to-form sense. I am a person who has tasted enough of the full life to know it is real, who has been formed enough by the inside-out process to know it works, and who is still saying — in every gathering, in every conversation, in every new room of the inexhaustible house of God’s nature:

I wanna know more.

That hunger is not a sign of deficiency. It is the sign of genuine life. Because genuine life — the zōē that Jesus came to give — is not a static possession. It is a dynamic, growing, ever-deepening, always-surprising encounter with a God who is always already more than anything we have yet discovered about Him.

The fully alive believer is not the one who has arrived. It is the one who is most genuinely, most joyfully, most irrevocably on the way.

TAKEAWAY LESSON:

The glory of God is a human being fully alive — fully alive with the life of Christ, expressed through the specific, ordinary, fully human reality of your daily existence. Jesus came to give you this life — not a religious supplement to half-alive existence, but the full, abundant, extravagant life that God designed you for. Stop settling for less. The fully alive life is not for spiritual celebrities. It is the standard. It is available. It is yours.

Fully Alive Examination: Ask yourself honestly: In what area of my life am I currently settled for less than the full life Jesus came to give? Where have I accepted a diminished, managed, safe version of the Christian life when something more genuinely alive was available? Bring that area to God today with open hands and say: “I want the full life You came to give. I am done settling. Show me what more alive looks like here.”

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com