LIFE IN CHRIST
LIFE IN CHRIST
It is plain that if you know Him that is from the beginning, you know Christianity, what He brought, and what He is, and not anything He found here. Life is given to every believer. Christ is the life; the Spirit is the means, so to speak, just as natural life was in the blood. Hence it is said, “If we live in the Spirit” (Galatians 5: 25); and “he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Galatians 6: 8). ———— is trying to awaken saints to the fact that having a title to a thing, and having practical possession of it, are two very different things. To say ‘it is God’s gift, and therefore it is mine’ is not enough. There is no continued earnestness to ascertain the nature or gain of the gift. The “young men” and “babes” (1 John 2) are going on to full consciousness of their possession; their title is not improved by their consciousness of it, but their enjoyment of it is. The fact [p. 138] is that the life is outside death, and you must travel through death to it, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” (John 6: 53). I hope we may be preserved from defining. I regard John 17: 3 more as a consequence than as a definition. I feel that it is on one’s knees that one learns it. Christ is my life; that is my comfort. I hold simply that every believer has eternal life as God’s gift, but every believer is not in practical realisation of it, and many do not know what it is. It is in Christ and could not be apart from Christ; hence if you are out of communion there is no sense of it, though you have not lost it, but you have got away from the source of it, and therefore you do not enjoy it.
When the Spirit occupies me with my own state, He has to settle with me before He can occupy me with Christ, who is my life....
... The interests of Christ’s life are the subjects of communion. His life and the thoughts of it are common to Him and to me. This I can understand.... The two words for “know” are well defined in 1 John 5: 20, and are very interesting.