Living Supernaturally 24/7
We Build People – Taking The Limits Off God
To be “in Christ” means to pull up the roots of one’s very life from the soil of sin and self and herd and plant them “in Christ.” He becomes the source of our life, the source of our thinking, our feeling, our acting, our being. This obviously involves self-surrender. Not merely the surrender of our sins, our bad habits, our wrong thinking, and our wrong motives, but of the very self behind all these. All of these are symptoms; the unsurrendered self is the disease. So the phrase “in Christ” is not only the ultimate concept, but it demands the ultimate act — self-surrender. The only thing we own is just ourselves. We don’t own our money, our property, not even the house we live in, for we will leave it all behind. The only thing we will take out with us is just ourselves. It is the only thing we own. That one thing we own — the self — is deliberately handed back to the Giver in an act of supreme self-surrender with words something like these: “I can’t handle this self of mine. Take me as I am, and make me as I ought to be. I give myself and my sins and my problems to Thee; but myself first and foremost. I’ve been ‘in myself.’; now I am ‘in Thee.’ ” We lose ourselves, and to our astonishment find ourselves. We live when we live “in Him.” One would expect that this ultimate concept in Christianity, “in Christ,” leading to the ultimate human response, self-surrender, would be deeply embedded in the New Testament. Is it? It is far more deeply embedded in the New Testament than many things upon which we have built whole denominations — the new birth, conversion, baptism of the Holy Spirit, justification by faith, baptism by water, apostolic succession, presbyters, bishops, forms of church government, inner light, absence of forms. The phrase “in Christ” or its equivalent is found 172 times in the New Testament.
HeartFaith@grace 