What Is His Life To Us Today?
When Jesus personally in His own body "carried our sins onto the cross," He was identifying with us in the ultimate degree.
No one can understand how He "carried our sins." His ways are higher than our ways. But as I realize that He did carry my sins onto His Cross, if I am thinking at all, I must also realize that He experienced their painful and frustrating consequences, too. Sin cannot be contained within the human heart without sin's accompanying consequences. When I am rebellious, my whole emotional and nervous system suffers. My body suffers. As I continue to rebel, the suffering increases. A resentment held in my own heart toward someone else causes me more pain and poison than it causes the one whom I resent. Medical science backs this up one hundred per cent. Medical statistics show that at least eighty per cent of all physical illness is emotional or mental in origin.
Think, then, of the magnified suffering of Christ as He carried the sins of every human being onto His Cross! No wonder He died. The darkness of that accumulated sin
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caused His humanity to cry out, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The weight of that sin broke His heart. He was sinless in Himself, but the terrible consequence of sin in our lives is no mystery to God. He experienced it all on the Cross.
To me, this has directly to do with my own willingness to allow Him to live His resurrection life in me now. Over and over we hear people say, "I know what Jesus Christ would do in my circumstances, but He was God's Son. He had the power to do it. I'm just a human being."
As far as it goes, this is true. But if a human being has linked his life with the life of the One who got up and left His tomb, that human being has access to His very life today!
As He has identified with us, so we can identify with Him. Peaceful Christians live the exchanged life. The Apostle Paul wrote, "I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."
And the Christ who lives in the human life of His followers knows how it feels to bear the consequences of sin. Too many new followers expect to get off the hook entirely where the error of their old lives is concerned. I know a woman whose shattered life is still shattered, even after she has turned to Christ, because she blocks Him at every turn. Her husband is dead, and since she drank heavily for twelve years before turning to Christ, the courts have put her two small children in the care of her mother. She has been a believer only about nine months, and although I neither question her sincerity (as far as she sees) nor the willingness of God to cooperate in her tragedy, she is standing still because she will not let go her demand that God should fix everything up at once. "I've turned to Christ now, why should I go on suffering? Why can't I have my children back now?"
She cannot seem to grasp the fact that He is involved in this predicament right now with her. When anyone
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links his life with Christ, He in turn links His with that human life. But He works realistically, as things are. This woman is not ready to care for her children yet. Even if she were, the courts would not release them to her. If she could see that in her every troubled day she has the choice of allowing Him to be Himself in her, she would be enabled by His life in her to make her way back to normalcy.
The Bible clearly states, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." There is no promise anywhere that any human being will be exempt from the consequences of his sin, past or present. He can be empowered not to sin in the same way again, but God does not make pets of His followers. If we break ourselves over His moral laws, we must be willing to submit to the consequences. And we can do this if we know that we do have access to His life every minute of our lives.
The Father did not make an exception for His sinless Son, and He would be unkind in the final analysis if He made exceptions for us. Jesus experienced the consequences of human sin on His Cross. He knows what it is like. He is not asking that we do anything which He Himself has not already done.
As I read through the daily newspapers, I am constantly amazed at how people who probably do not know of the tremendous potential of the human life linked with the life of Christ, can go through the torment of the daily tragedies.
I have tried life both ways. For thirty-three years of my life, I lived it alone, orbiting independently of God. For ten years I have known the stability and security of my life linked with His life. I have known the certainty of His life within me. Actually, during the ten years as His follower, I have had more problems and more hardships and more grief than in all the thirty-three years before. And yet, the pressure has been off! I have not been alone
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in them. No matter what happens, if I am willing to remember and act on the fact that He is living His life within mine, I find unlimited resources for anything that happens.
Occasionally, I must still cope with a consequence of my life before Christ invaded it. By now, I almost welcome these consequences. They're far from comfortable, but when I allow Him to be Himself in me as they occur, I find I emerge stronger, even more peaceful and with a sharpened sense of humor and wisdom.
By now, you know that the theme of this book is the necessity for us to find out what God is really like. I return to that theme here. If your concept of God is distorted or superficial or false, it will be of little help to you to know that He lives in you. But if you know Him as He is knowable through a continuing discovery of Jesus Christ, you will find your rebellions dwindling. Few persons openly doubt the power of God. But most of us act as though we do doubt His intentions toward us!
He is not a separate, remote stranger living within you. He is your Creator. And because He created you, He knows your inner, true self better than you will ever know it. We do not need to master a set of victorious life techniques, as I once believed. We need to discover the true nature of the Master! Once we discover Him as He is, we begin to feel at home with Him. We begin to wonder why we ever struggled to win our own victories. We relax at the center of our personalities. We enter into the rest He promised, if we come to Him and learn of Him.
This is not an easily grasped truth. God does not whisk us on a celestial carpet from the realm of stumbling, struggling, defeated Christians to the smooth and rutless realm of perfect sainthood. It is a daily life together. Our lives and His life. And its route is mountainous and sometimes very slow and rough. There are detours and road work along the way. There are also four-laned highways
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here and there, but even on the four-laned highways there is the danger that we begin to feel too confident and exceed the speed limits. Still, all along the way, realistic and rough as it is, there are our lives together with His. Every bump we take, He takes, too.
A long, hard trip is never so tiring or discouraging if we have good company on the way. I traveled alone on my speaking engagements for almost eight years. Now I have a partner who travels with me. We can be together twenty-four hours a day and never tire of each other's company. A speaking tour of twice the length tires me far less now than when I traveled alone.
If this can be true with two human beings, what endless resources are available when we realize that He is not only with us, but in us, wherever the road goes.
In the preceding chapter we looked at the first part of Romans 5:10. It might be well to examine the whole verse again, with emphasis on the last part in this chapter. "For if as enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more surely shall we, who have been reconciled, be saved by His life."
"...much more surely shall we, who have been reconciled, be saved by His life."
Is there a general confusion of terms here among Christians? According to Paul, we are saved by His life. What does this mean? Surely no one will argue the fact that we need to be saved daily. I am not speaking of the new birth here. We will go into that in another chapter. Perhaps we have oversimplified and limited the word saved. Personally, I agree with the obvious implication of Paul here. I am being saved by His life. This is undoubtedly a continuous thing which is taking place with me, because His life is continuous. I need to be saved minute by minute from my own willful nature. And this is made possible by the life of Christ in me. In each instance I choose whether I will be myself in a certain circumstance, or
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whether I will let Him be Himself. He has the power to take me past the rough places. He has the power to lift me over the mudholes. He has the power to straighten me out when I try to take the curves too fast.
And this power is not some sudden magical influx which comes bolting down to me out of the blue. It is Christ Himself with me and in me.
The power to live sane, creative, mature lives is not a separate gift from God. It is in the very Person of Christ Himself. Power does not come in a package. We cannot store it up. It is not a static commodity in any sense. It is as ever present as Christ.
I once heard the Trinity explained this way: God the Father is God for us. His intentions are all toward us. God the Son is God with us, and in Him is the same nature as in the Father. The same intentions. The Holy Spirit is God in us, enabling us to respond to Himself. The Holy Spirit, of course, has the same nature as the Father and the Son.
Our response to God, as we can know Him in the three persons of the Godhead, is conditioned by our recognition of the constant, indwelling Presence of the Spirit. When Jesus was on earth He spoke and lived and communicated His love directly with those He met. The same thing is happening now in the Presence of the Holy Spirit of this same Christ within.
No one can ever fully understand or express the Trinity. But as far as I can see, the only thing we need to know for certain is that although there are expressed as three Persons, there is absolutely no contradiction among them. They are one. The Son, Jesus Christ, returned to His Father. We'll see Him one day and I'm sure He will still be in a body we can recognize. But He is with us and in us just as surely now in the Person of His Holy Spirit.
It is really a foolish prayer to ask God for power!
All power to live safe, sane, creative lives on this earth
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is available in the Person of the Spirit of Christ with us and in us. We draw power from His Person, therefore it is ridiculous to ask God for what we already have been given when He gave us His Spirit.
However new you are in your Christian life, the moment you opened your life to Christ His Spirit invaded your body, your personality, your mind, your emotions. No one but God understands how this comes out. He does, however, so I find I don't need to waste my energies worrying about it. If you have received Christ, He is there. Your part now is to learn of Him. Learn how to live in harmony with Him. This, of course, is called obedience. After all, He is your Master now. Once you were your own. No more.
If you have not yet opened your life to all you know of God in Jesus Christ, you have this up ahead. When you do, He will come. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man will open the door, I will come in and sup with him and he with Me."
From that moment on, He will be in you and with you, even when you eat! These words, "I will come in and sup with him and he with Me," are from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. Words spoken by the risen and ascended Christ. He has not changed just because He has returned to His glory. He is still the same gentle, careful, patient, considerate Lord. Just because He has returned to His glory apparently gives Him no license to beat down your door.
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock...."
He waits for you to decide. But when you open the door He will come in. And speaking as the resurrected and glorified Christ, He took time to remind us that when He comes in, He will sup with us and we with Him. Jesus Christ is no less mindful of our human need to know He will be with us, caring about us even in the small daily things now, than He was when He walked this earth
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experiencing the same human needs. We need constantly to remember, "There is a Man on the throne up there!"
When things are going rather well of us, we find it quite possible to believe that Christ lives in us. That we are saved from ourselves by His life. When things go wrong, it is not so easy to believe it. Some spoiled-brat streak in all of us seems to cling to the idea that if God is really near by, things should be going well for us!
Here again is the tremendous necessity for us to know what He is like. He reminds us, "In the world you are under pressure...." Nowhere in the Bible does God promise to make life easy for anyone. But He does promise to be with us in all things. And if we have learned and are continuing to learn what He is really like, we find our trouble spots, not obnoxious things to jump over or avoid, but opportunities to face up to the unrealities within us, opportunities to try out His life in us, opportunities to enter into a still closer and more dynamic relationship with Him.
Everything may seem to be going wrong in your life now, but all power to see you through your present trouble is in His Person, and He has said, "Lo, I am with you always." He is there, and when He is there all the power you need is available for you to use.
The power-filled Christian life is merely a life in contact with Jesus Christ. And "neither death nor life, neither angels nor mighty ones, neither present nor future affairs, neither powers of the heights nor of the depths, neither anything else created shall be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
