The Indefinable Mystery
Posted by jerrywhite on Aug 12, 2010
The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
Deuteronomy 33:27 (ESV)
This mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Colossians 1:27 (ESV)
Your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:3 (ESV)
~~~
“I obtained an enlarged, more accurate and more experimental view of the Third Person of the blessed Trinity. From the first I had been moved to wonder at the ineffable mystery of the Trinity which reaches its climax in the fact of the Holy Spirit. It is much that God the Father is above me, it is more that God the Son is for me, it is still more that God the Holy Spirit is within me. It has been well said that no one can understand the doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Christ who does not first find it incredible. But the mystery that the believer in Christ becomes an ‘incarnation’ of God is still greater.”
G. H. Morling
The Quest for Serenity, 38
~~~
Is it real to you that as a believer you are in Christ and the Spirit of Christ is in you?
It is good to see this truth in God’s Word, but it only becomes life changing when it is in your soul by the Spirit’s revelation. This is why the Apostle Paul prayed like he did for the Ephesians (Ephesians 1:15-23). With all his brilliance, and seminary training by the Lord Himself, he could not write the truth in such a convincing way that the Ephesians would know it experimentally in their heart. Heart revelation only comes by the Holy Spirit, and He works in response to prayerful asking and seeking. Knowing the truth by the Spirit’s revelation affects the way we think and therefore how we live. There seems to be a whole lot of teaching in our day but little with heart revelation by the Spirit. Meditation on the truth, plus the Spirit’s revelation in answer to prayer, brings heart transformation. What is in your heart is what you live out in your life.
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Himself
Posted by jerrywhite on Jul 11, 2010
“I prayed a long time to get sanctified, and sometimes I thought I had it. On one occasion I felt something, and I held on with a desperate grip for fear should I should lose it, and kept awake the whole night fearing it would go, and, of course, it went with the next sensation and the next mood. Of course, I lost it because I did not hold on to Him. I had been taking a little water from the reservoir, when I might have all the time received from Him fullness through the open channels. I went to meetings and heard people speak of joy. I even thought I had the joy, but I did not keep it because I had not Himself as my joy. At last He said to me—Oh, so tenderly—‘My child, just take Me, and let Me be in you the constant supply of all this, Myself.’ And when at last I got my eyes off my sanctification, and my experience of it, and just placed them on the Christ in me, I found instead of an experience, the Christ larger than the moment’s need, the Christ that had all that I should ever need who was given to me at once, and forever! And when I thus saw Him, it was such rest; it was all right, and right forever. For I had not only what I could hold that little hour, but also in Him, all that I should need the next and the next and so on, until sometimes I get a glimpse of what it will be a million years afterwards, when we shall ‘shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of our Father’ (Matt. 13:43), and have ‘all the fullness of God.’”
A. B. Simpson
~~~
For in Him the whole fullness of Deity (the Godhead) continues to dwell in bodily form [giving complete expression of the divine nature]. And you are in Him, made full and having come to fullness of life [in Christ you too are filled with the Godhead—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and reach full spiritual stature].
Colossians 2:9-10 (Amplified Bible)
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Every grace gift we need is in the Lord Jesus. No gift exists apart from Him. When He comes to live in His followers by the Holy Spirit, all that He is comes to live within. What else do we need besides “Himself” within? It is a matter of quietly trusting Him.
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His Life Within
Posted by jerrywhite on Apr 28, 2010
“Hear the Savior’s promise as though you had never heard it before. He, the Holy Spirit, the Other Comforter, the Higher Mode in which Christ Himself is present, ‘shall be with you and shall be within you!’ You have not known spiritual reality because you have not used the way of inwardness.
It appears to me that the way of inwardness implies three things. There must first of all be an opening of the understanding to comprehend the mystery of God’s Indwelling. Seeing that your quest must end in failure unless there is clear thinking and sincere response at this point, may I urge that, now and often, you kneel and offer a prayer such as this: ‘Most Holy God, in adoring wonder I bow before Thee in the presence of this wondrous mystery of grace; my spirit, soul and body Thy temple. In deep silence and worship I accept the blessed revelation, that in me, too, there is a Holiest of all, and that there Thy hidden Glory has its abode. O my God, forgive me that I have so little known it. I do now tremblingly accept the blessed truth: God the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who is God Almighty, dwells in me.’ [Prayer from Andrew Murray’s The Spirit of Christ]
G. H. Morling
The Quest for Serenity, 72-73
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And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you [emphasis mine].
John 14:16-17 (ESV)
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Do you believe the Lord’s words? Oh, He cannot lie! Are these comforting and instructive words real to you? Surely they can be! These are solid facts and promises from the lips of the Lord Jesus. He spoke them to all His followers. You can live out of His life within you and enjoy His constant presence and strength when you believe what He said and trust Him to make it real in your life.
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Christ’s Life In Me
Posted by jerrywhite on Mar 22, 2010
“I saw that because of Christ’s indwelling I had Christ’s own life within me, a life which had known experience on earth and, though tempted in all points such as we are, had been without sin. Under the guidance of wise masters of the inner life I adopted a new spiritual technique. I stopped praying for my own self to be controlled. Instead I prayed for grace to cease from myself, and to allow Christ to live His own life through me. Instead of praying in times of stress, ‘Lord, keep me calm,’ I prayed, ‘Lord, entrench me in Thy calm. Not now my weakness made strong but my weakness abandoned and Thy strength, a strength tested and triumphant in like circumstances, permitted to express itself through my surrendered personality.’ That was gain indeed. It was not only an immediate enrichment; it was also the opening up of a new world of possibility. ‘If any man be in Christ,’ writes Paul, ‘there is a new creation, (not just he is a new creature) old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.’ As Weymouth adds in a footnote: ‘There is a new God, a new world, a new self.’ By consciously abiding in Christ, horizons were widened for me. At the same time I obtained an enlarged, more accurate and more experimental view of the Third Person of the blessed Trinity.”
G. H. Morling
The Quest For Serenity, 30-31
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It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20 (ESV)
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O to be saved from myself, dear Lord,
O to be lost in Thee,
O that it may be no more I,
But Christ that lives in me.
C. H. Forrest
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A Savior Born
Posted by jerrywhite on Dec 25, 2008
Let the stable still astonish:
Straw—dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said, “Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens
And earth
Be born here, in this place?”
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
Of our hearts and says, “Yes, let the God
Of Heaven and Earth be born here—
In this place.”
Leslie Leyland Fields
~~~
That the Creator Himself would be born as a creature in a stable is astonishing, but that He would actually come to live inside His followers by His Spirit is incomprehensible. That the Lord Jesus is all the fullness of God in a body is unfathomable, but that we as His believers have this very same fullness in Him is staggering (Colossians 2:9-10). What difference would it make to us if we really believed that we have all of His fullness in our very selves—that we are literally the temple of His Holy Spirit—that He is truly closer to us than our own breath—that we are as one with the Lord Jesus as He is with His Father? For this miraculous Gift I praise you, O God! I receive it with deep thankfulness. I marvel at how You love me!
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