Expressing Christ 1/8

Expressing Christ in Everyday Life
Part 1 of 8

Christ is in us!

Colossians 1:25–29
“I have become [the Church’s] servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness—the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people (literally, the holy ones of God). To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.” (NIV)

When Christ resides in a person, that person has eternal Life. In John 4:13–14 Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (NIV)

This was a mystery to the Hebrew people. They knew that God was going to send a savior, but they anticipated someone who would make the earthly nation of Israel into a kingdom that would rule the world. They had a temporal understanding of something the Lord was planning to do in the spiritual realm as well as in the temporal. The consequences would be much more pervasive than the Hebrews anticipated.

One of the clearest pictures we get of this is contained in the passage I call “the great promise.” In Ezekiel 36:27 we read, “I will put my Spirit in you and move (or cause) you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” (NIV)

The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, is the Spirit of Christ. Romans 8:9–11 expands on this. I this passage we read, “You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” (NIV)

The very last phrase in this passage is an important key to understanding how Christ in us is lived out in our daily lives. He is living in us, and He gives life to our mortal bodies. Clearly, we were living creatures even before Christ came to live within us. Now that He is in us however, He is the dynamo empowering what we do. More on that later.

Here’s the way Jesus put it in John 6:53–56 “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.” (NIV)

This imagery of eating flesh and drinking blood paints a picture of Christ in us. It’s shown in a similar way in the Lord’s Supper, or what we often call Communion. In this practice, we consume bread and wine. The picture is the same. The body and blood of Christ is figuratively taken into us and is our sustenance. It is the source of our life and of the energy required to live upright and godly lives in this world.

We learn in John 14:16–20 that the way in which the Lord Jesus is in us is by His Spirit. The passage reads, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (NIV)

I want us to be sure not to miss the way the Lord Jesus comingles Himself, the Spirit, and the Father. He says that He will ask the Father to send the Spirit. He says that the Spirit will live in us and be with us. He then says that He (the Lord Jesus) will not leave us and that He will come to us. He caps it all off saying that we live because He lives, that He is in the Father, and we are in Him and He is in us! My goodness!! I guess we have God in us.

Before we move on from here, I want to comment on something that you may encounter from time to time. It’s becoming fashionable of late to call into question the Trinity. The doctrine (or teaching) that there is One God, yet He exists in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That the Lord Jesus speaks as He does in this passage should help us put that to rest. Is the doctrine of the trinity a perfect expression of the essence of God? Most certainly not. It is, however, the best way we have come up with of understanding and talking about what scripture teaches about God’s essence, and it has stood the test of 1800 years of contemplative examination.