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"When
Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested…"
(Col. 3:4).
One of the main objects of
the Holy Spirit is to get believers really
identified with Christ as the risen and exalted
Lord, and to make His risen life real in their
experience. As the age moves toward
its consummation---the manifestation of
Christ---two features will become increasingly
evident. On the one hand things,
men, movements, institutions, organizations,
etc., will predominate and draw multitudes after
them, and will attach the crowds to
themselves. On the other hand with a
growing disappointment and disillusionment over
these, a minority will turn to the Lord Himself
to find Him alone as their life.
Three elements will be
inherent in all this. One is the
continued and unmistakable development of the
principle of 'antichrist.' The
second is the alternative to the whole Christ in
man-made Christianity, an imitation life born
and carried on by its own momentum.
The third is a deep and genuine quest for
reality, truth, and inward knowledge of the Lord
Himself.
In the first case it will
be a naked worship of man in human power: a
tremendous overflow of humanism, the wonder and
glory of man. The third will be Christ
altogether as the life.
If the Christian is
attached to something, such as a teaching, a
tradition, an institution, a movement, or a
person, the end will certainly be a limitation
of life and eventually confusion and
disappointment, perhaps worse. The
New Testament makes it unmistakably clear and
emphatic that the destiny of all is to be
"Christ all and in all."
We must learn that a true
work of the Spirit of God is to attach
everything to Christ Himself. He,
Christ, must be the life of our Spirit, the
"innerman," so that we are strong in the Lord:
not in ourselves, nor in others, nor in
things. We shall have to survive
adversity by His strength within
alone.
Christ will have to be the
life of our mind. Perplexity will
find us without the power to explain and
understand, but the Spirit will teach and lead.
Christ will need to be life
for our bodies. There is such a
thing as Divine life for the physical
body. Not always does the Lord
choose to heal the body, but He does always want
to be its life, even in suffering, to fulfill
His purpose.
It is the Lord Himself, and
for this to be so, it often has to be against a
background of natural inability. The
power of His resurrection is the law of union
with Christ from beginning to end.
Days of terrific pressure are upon the Lord's
people. Their enemy is taking very
little 'off-time.' The only
sufficiency is in the Lord Himself as our life.
Barnabas exhorted the
believers at the beginning that "with purpose of
heart they should cleave unto the Lord" (Acts
11:23). There is an utterness about
this that will be pressed upon us until the time
"when Christ, who is our life, shall be
manifested."
