You did not choose Me, but I chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit – fruit that will last. John 15:16
The new creation is in
Christ. It is not in you, and not in me, and never will be. All that it will
mean in time, and in eternity will be through our spiritual union with Christ.
All God's fullness is in Christ. We shall receive all that fullness, and enjoy
it in a practical out-working. But this, while we are yet here in time, will
ever be by faith's union. In eternity, where the reception of that fullness
will be unhindered, the work of faith, though not its fruit, will have passed.
But we shall never be absorbed in Christ in the sense that we become so many
Christs. It will still be Himself as distinct Who is to be glorified. We shall
never be glorifying ourselves, neither shall we be glorified by others as
though we were Christ. Christ is not some great widespread essence, which is
going to become the constitution of a great multitude, so that that multitude
becomes a Christ in essence. It will ever be true that Christ remains apart in
His Person, though manifested in His glory and in His excellence in the saints,
and we shall still, therefore, be worshiping Him as objective and distinct in
His own Person from ourselves.
Perhaps that hardly
needs saying. But it is very important that we should recognize that forever God
has bound up everything with His Son, and that nothing will ever be had or
enjoyed apart from Christ, while for this present life that is only by faith in
the Lord Jesus. The object of this present emphasis is to seek, as the Lord
will enable, that there shall be an emancipation from ourselves; for that
occupation, that consideration, is always taking from His glory. Let us ask the
Lord to cut us really free from ourselves by an unveiling and presentation of
His Son to us, as the sum total of all that ever God desires and wills.
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