...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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