...The Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit
together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.
(Colossians 2:19)
What is the believer? In God's sight the
believer is one in whom Christ is implanted, and God never looks at Christ in a
limited way. He always looks at Him in an absolute way, and when Christ is
implanted at the beginning of our life it is not as though God implanted Him in
a fragmentary way. God's thought was that the end should be bound up with the
beginning, and that Christ should be All and in all. That is why conversion is
never an end in itself. It is only the first step toward the full end of God.
It defines the nature of the believer in God's sight, that it is of Christ. You
cannot make that. No decision cards can accomplish that. You can never make men
and women Christians by inviting them to make certain decisions, to assent
mentally to certain propositions of Christian doctrine, though perfectly true
as to the Person and work of the Lord Jesus. There has to be something which
constitutes in that individual, right at the very center of the being, a living
union with Christ, and a deposit of Christ. Anything other than that is a false
conversion. It is the depositing of Christ at the very center of the being,
with a view to His spreading to the very circumference, that is the nature of a
believer....
You see the pathetic hopelessness of trying
to propagate anything by organized means and methods which really is all of
God. It simply has to grow, it simply has to be. Ah, but when it
is so it is mighty, it is indestructible, it is incorruptible. Nothing can
stand in the way of Christ. It is that which rouses hell and the energies of
the Devil. He does not mind all the other: doctrine, work, profession. That may
often serve his ends as a great deception and misrepresentation; but bring
Christ in, bring Christ through, realize Christ, and then you meet every force
in this universe which is antagonistic to Christ.
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