You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Christ is your life. When He appears, then you, too, will appear with Him in glory. Colossians 3:3,4
We are
very often inclined to think that the Life of the Lord in us needs in some way
to be improved, to be added to, when really what is required is that we should
discover what we have, and, discovering it by experience, live according to it.
This Life is not something apart from the Lord Jesus, and we can never think of
His standing in need of some improvement, nor of the possibility of something
being added to Him to make Him complete, or more complete. We would never think
like that. And this Life is one with Himself. As the Apostle says, it is Christ
who is our Life, and our need is to discover what Christ is in us, and to live
accordingly. So in a very real sense it is a matter of the Life getting more of
us, rather than of our getting more of the Life. That, at any rate, is the way
of its working.
This, in
the ordering of God, has to be done in a world where death still rules and
works; for in this world the destruction of death has not yet been made
manifest. Death, like the devil, goes on, although Calvary still remains full
victory. We are left in this world, and it is in this world where death reigns
and works as a great energy that we, by this sovereign ordering of God, have to
come to prove the values of the Life which has been deposited in us, and to
discover its potentialities. This is an experimental discovery. It therefore
resolves itself into battle between that which is in this world and the Life
which is in the believer. It is the battle for Life, not as to the forfeiture
of that Life – not as to whether death can take eternal Life away from us, for
that is not the question at issue – but as to the triumphant expression and the
full manifestation of the power of that Life. That is the issue.
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