There
are many misconceptions as to what the Christian life
really is. I shall, however, not say very much about this
negative side - that is, as to that which is either
mistaken, confused or inadequate. The best way of dealing
with all such difficulties is to take the positive line,
by seeking to present the truth in its fullness, as we
may be enabled, and so leave the comparisons to be made
by those who read.
Our
first phase of this matter, then, is the immense
significance of the Christian life. That phrase embodies
a principle of very great importance. It is this, that we
shall never really appreciate anything presented to us in
the Word of God until we see it in its full setting. If
we regard it as just something in itself, we miss a great
deal. We need to get its great background and its great
setting in order to feel the full impact of its
significance. That is what we shall seek to do now, as we
are Divinely enabled - to see something at least of the
immense significance of the Christian life.
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE BEGINS WITH
CHRIST
We shall probably be on the ground of
common agreement when we say that the Christian life
begins with Christ, but that means a great deal more than
it sounds. To say that Christianity began with Jesus is
true if you put Jesus in His right setting, and it is
just at that point that an adjustment may be necessary in
order to grasp the immensity of this matter. For neither
the Christian life nor Christianity began with the
historic Jesus. They did not begin when Jesus was born,
when Jesus lived here, when Jesus died and rose again. It
is just there, I say, that we need to make an adjustment.
We must know what it is that the Bible shows as to our
Lord Jesus Christ.
CHRIST IN THE 'BEFORE TIMES
ETERNAL'
Now you take up your New Testament, and
open at the Gospels. You find that Matthew traces the
genealogy of Jesus back to Abraham. Luke takes Him back
still further, to Adam. Mark begins his life of Jesus at
the time of His baptism, when He was thirty years of age.
But John reaches beyond them all, back through the thirty
years, beyond Bethlehem, back to Abraham and beyond
Abraham to Adam; and he does not stop there, he goes
still further back. "In the beginning" -
whenever, wherever, that dateless time was - "in the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God." That is a statement - and it is
only a statement, a statement of truth, of fact - as to
the Person of the Lord Jesus; and that, with one or two
other sentences, is all that John gives us.
But we have in the New Testament, through
another Apostle, a much fuller revelation concerning
Jesus in that dateless past. Through the Apostle Paul we
are taken right back and shown a very great deal about
God's Son "before times eternal", not only
before He came into this world, but before this present
world order came into being. It is the general custom to
begin a biography with something concerning the ancestry
of the person in view, leading up to his or her birth,
the whole thing being, of course, just an account of the
human and earthly history of this person. But the
biography of Jesus Christ does not only go right back
long before His own birth into this world and beyond His
human parentage or ancestry. A large section of the
biography of Jesus Christ in the Word of God relates to
that which is called "before times eternal".
Here are some fragments of Scripture. We hear Him
praying. He is praying to His Father, and He is saying:
"Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory
which I had with thee before the world was" (John
17:5). That is really a bit of His biography, or
autobiography - "the glory which I had with thee
before the world was." And then the Apostle Paul, in
that matchless description of Him, has this one clause,
this mighty clause of only five words: "He is before
all things" (Col. 1:17). "The glory which I had
with thee before the world was." "He is before
all things."
It is right back there, then, that we
travel to find the meaning of a Christian, the Christian
life and Christianity. Let us contemplate the Lord Jesus
there, from the standpoint of definite statements in the
Scriptures.
First of all, as to His Person - what He
was like then. "God... hath... spoken unto us in his
Son... who being the effulgence of his glory, and the
very image of his substance..." (Heb. 1:2,3). That
certainly does not belong to the days of His humiliation.
That goes right back, as we shall see in a moment, in the
very connection or context of those words - "the
express image of his substance", "the
effulgence of his glory". That is what He was like
before the world was.
What was His position then? "...Who,
existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an
equality with God a thing to be grasped" (Phil.
2:6). Though He was equal with God, on an equality with
God, He counted not that equality with God as something
to be grasped. Equal with God, on equality with God -
that was His position then.
Then as to His appointment. Here again is
the Scripture context of the words we quoted just now.
"God... hath... spoken unto us in his Son, whom he
appointed heir of all things". "APPOINTED
heir of all things". When did that happen? That was
not done in time, that was not at the time of His birth
or subsequently. That was right away back there in
eternity past. There was something done in the counsels
of the Godhead, whereby the Son of God was appointed Heir
of all things, when it was determined that all things
should be the heritage of God's Son, His rightful
inheritance as God's Heir. It was not, of course, that He
was to come into it on the demise of God, but God bound
up all things with His Son, and made Him their Inheritor.
These are things that we know through the Scriptures. How
did the men who stated them come to know? Well, they tell
us. Paul, who says most about this, tells us quite
definitely that it was given to him by revelation: God
made it known to him.
That, then, as to the "before times
eternal". And out of that relationship with God, out
of that fellowship with God, and out of that appointment
of God, came the next move, the creation of the present
world: not the creation of the present world condition,
but the present cosmic order; and again we are given very
much information and light as to the relationship of
Christ to this.
CHRIST THE AGENT OF CREATION
We are told in the first place that He was
the Agent of it, God's Agent in the creation. Here is the
statement: "All things were made through him; and
without him was not anything made that hath been
made" (John 1:3). Or again another statement:
"In him were all things created, in the heavens and
upon the earth, things visible and things invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things have been created through him, and unto
him" (Col. 1:16). And if it needs another word to
bear that out, here it is: "There is... one Lord
Jesus Christ, through whom are all things" (1 Cor.
8:6). He was the Agent in creation.
CHRIST THE OBJECT AND INTEGRATOR
OF CREATION
He is the Object of creation. "In him
were all things created". "All things have been
created through him, and unto him". And yet another
statement: "For of him, and through him, and unto
him, are all things" (Rom. 11:36). And then a
further movement, or a further constituent of this
creative activity and purpose, is indicated. It is found
in the little clause which completes that wonderful
statement that we have read earlier. "He is before
all things, and in him all things consist" (Col.
1:17). The Agent, the Object, the Integrator. "In
him all things hold together" - are integrated. He
is therefore the very reason for the creation. Remove
Him, and the creation will disintegrate. When they
crucified Him and He committed His Spirit to God, saying:
"Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit",
there was a great earthquake, and the sun was hidden, and
darkness was over the face of the earth. The very Object
of the creation has been put out of His place by man. The
creation knows that its very Integrator has been
rejected. These are but tokens of a great fact. Jesus
Christ is the very meaning of this creation: without Him
the creation has no meaning.
Perhaps, if you are a thinking person, you
are saying, 'Well, these are tremendous statements; they
may be a wonderful theory, a system of teaching,
wonderful ideas; but are they facts? How can you prove
them?' My dear friend, you are yourself a proof of them.
In these talks we are seeking to discover the meaning of
the Christian life. Until you find Jesus Christ you have
no meaning at all in your own creation. The first thing
that is livingly true about one who finds Jesus Christ as
their Lord and Saviour is that they are conscious of
having found the meaning of their very being - they have
discovered why they are alive! Life then takes on its
true meaning, and these are no longer just great
wonderful truths, suspended in an abstract way for our
contemplation, acceptance or rejection. They are borne
out in the creation, and you and I are a part of it.
There is no unification of our own individual lives; we
are divided, scattered people; life is not an order at
all - it is a chaos - until Jesus becomes the centre. But
when that happens, there is a marvellous integration.
We shall have to come back to that
presently. At the moment we are occupied with Jesus
Christ, firstly away back before the world was, and then
as the Agent, Object and Integrator of the creation. Out
of this, three wonderful, though simple, things quite
clearly arise. Firstly, His likeness to God - He was the
very image, or impress, as the word is, of God's
substance; secondly, His oneness with God; and thirdly,
that aspect of His Person as the agency of God. I want
you to keep those things in mind, because they are
carried over and they come very much into this matter of
the Christian life. With all this, however, we have to
recognise a uniqueness and exclusiveness about Him, and I
want to underline that as many times as I can, lest
presently it might look as though I were on very
dangerous ground. But I want you to extract those three
things: likeness to God, oneness with God, and agency of
God's purpose and God's work - in the case of Christ
something unique and absolutely exclusive, gathered into
the word Deity, 'very God of very God'. That, in brief -
but oh, what a comprehensiveness, what a profundity, what
a fullness! - that in brief is what we are told about
Jesus Christ before He came into this world. Let us now
pass on to what the Bible has to say about man.
MAN MADE TO REPRESENT GOD
What is the very first thing that the
Bible says about man? "And God said, Let us make man
in our image, after our likeness" (Gen. 1:26). That
is the Divine conception, that is the Divine idea. And
what does that amount to? Surely it amounts to
representation of God. Any image of a thing is supposed
to be the representation of that thing, and the idea or
conception of man in the Divine mind was that man should
represent God. Not, of course, in that exclusive sense -
Deity - of which I have just spoken: that does not come
into it with man at all; but in this matter of being an
expression of God, bearing the likeness of God: so that
if you should meet a man who answers to the Divine idea
you have a very good idea of what God is like. If only
that were more true! - but in a very limited way we do
know something of it, when we sometimes meet what we call
a 'godly' man (and 'godly' is only 'God-like'
abbreviated), and we say to one another, 'When you meet
that man, you seem to meet the Lord, you seem to find
something of the Lord - you seem to touch what you think
the Lord would be like.'
Now, that was the Divine intention,
conception, idea, as to man; but the intention was that
the representation should be a full one, that the
existence of man should convey the knowledge of what God
is like in His moral character, in the beauty of His
personality, that in touching man you should touch an
expression of God, and be led back to God. And therein is
a principle, mark you, a principle that we ought to take
up, and that is to be carried into this matter of what it
means to be a Christian. All our talking about God or
Christ is utterly worthless unless we CONVEY God
and Christ - unless our Lord is found in us. That is the
best thing, and sometimes that does its work without any
talking, whereas a vast amount of talking will do nothing
unless there is the touch of the Lord there. The
conception of man in the heart of God is just that HE
should be found in a creation.
You see, the Lord Jesus when He was here
was always trying to convey, by different means,
sometimes by stories or parables, an impression of what
God is like. He was speaking to people of very small
spiritual apprehension. He could not go beyond
illustrations, pictures and figures such as, for
instance, the parable - or was it a life-story? - known
as 'The Prodigal Son'. I think it is a misnomer. It would
be better to call the story 'A Father's Love', and you
would get to the heart of what the Lord Jesus was after.
What He was saying was that when you have contemplated
that father, his broken heart and his marvellous
forgiveness and restoration, even smothering confession
before it is finished, and lavishing upon that renegade
son all that he had, you have got a faint idea of what
God is like. And man was intended to be endowed and
endued with the Divine nature. Peter even uses those
words. "He hath granted unto us his precious and
exceeding great promises; that through these ye may
become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter
1:4). Once again, let me emphasize that we leave Deity
out. It is enough that we may bear the Divine likeness -
a likeness in nature - without aspiring to Deity.
ONENESS IN LIFE
It was God's thought, moreover, that man
should become an inheritor of the very uncreated life of
God. He was put on test, on probation, and missed it. It
was there in the symbolic form of the tree of life, to be
had on condition, but he missed it: and so man by nature
- all the children of Adam right up to our own time and
ourselves - has never possessed that Divine life outside
of Jesus Christ. But that is the gift. As we shall see
later, that is one of the great things that happen when
we become Christians: we become partakers of God's own,
Divine, eternal, uncreated life.
FELLOWSHIP IN PURPOSE
Then again, God's idea for man was not
only likeness and oneness, but fellowship in purpose:
that man should be brought into a working relationship
with God in His great, His vast, purposes in this
universe. The statement of Scripture is: "Thou
madest him to have dominion over the works of thy
hands" (Ps. 8:6) - fellowship with God. Here again
we have a vast amount in the New Testament. I think we
could probably say that ninety percent of the New
Testament is occupied with this co-operation with God in
His great purposes on the part of Christians. The Apostle
Paul is so fond of using that phrase, 'according to His
purpose'. Fellowship in the purpose of God - that was in
God's mind in creating man.
But note, that all this likeness in
nature, oneness in life, and fellowship in purpose, is
related inseparably to God's Son, Jesus Christ: there can
be none of it apart from the appointed Heir. We are said
to be "joint-heirs"; that is, we come into
things by union with Christ. So the Apostle Paul has as
his abundant phrase, found everywhere (two hundred times)
in his writings - "in Christ", "in
Christ": nothing apart from Christ, nothing outside
of Christ. It is all in Christ, inseparably bound up with
God's eternally appointed Heir of all things.
THE FAILURE OF MAN
Before we can follow that through into the
Christian life, we have to look at that tragic interlude,
as we may call it - the failure of man. We know the
story, how it is written and how it is put. If you have
difficulty in accepting the form in which the story is
given, that is, either the actual way in which the test
was set before Adam, as to the tree, the fruit, etc., or
all this as symbolism, you should be helped in such
difficulty by remembering that behind any form of
presentation there are spiritual principles, and these
are the essential and vital things. It is the MEANING that
matters, not so much the form of conveyance.
We want to get behind that man's failure.
The Bible tells us what the source of that failure was.
Here again, marvellously, we are taken right back before
the creation. The veil is drawn aside and we are shown
something happening outside of this world, somewhere
where those counsels of God have become known, His
counsels concerning His Son and the appointment of His
Son as Lord of creation, as Heir of all things. It has
become known amongst the angels, the hierarchy of Heaven,
and there is one there, the greatest created being of
all, Lucifer, son of the morning, who becomes acquainted
with this Divine intention. How - this is the mystery -
how into that realm iniquity could enter we do not know:
we cannot fathom the origin of sin; but what we are told
is that "unrighteousness was found" in him
(Ezek. 28:15). Pride was found in his heart.
Pride immediately works out in jealousy,
does it not? Think of pride again. It always immediately
shows itself in jealousy, rivalry. Pride cannot endure
even an equal. Pride will always lead to a trying to 'go
one better' in whatever realm it is. And so all the
jealousy and all the rivalry sprang into that heart. We
are told in the Scripture that that one said: "I
will exalt my throne above the stars of God; ...I will
ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like
the Most High" (Isa. 14:13,14). He was jealous of
God's Heir, and a rival to His appointment; Heaven was
rent. But that one was cast out (Ezek 28:16-18). We are
told that he was cast out of his estate together with all
those who entered into that conspiracy with him against
God's Son. Those "angels which kept not their own
principality, but left their proper habitation"
(Jude 6), were cast out.
The next thing we see is the appearance of
this one in beautiful guise - not with horns and tail and
pitchfork! - but in beautiful guise to deceive; we see
him coming into the realm of God's creation, to man and
his partner. Now, what was his method? We shall never
understand the meaning of the Christian life until we
grasp these things. What was the method, what was the
focal point, of the great arch-enemy's attack upon the
man - this man whom God had created to come into
fellowship with His Son in the great purpose of the ages?
The focal point was man's SELF-hood.
I doubt whether the man had any consciousness of selfhood
until Satan touched him on that point and said,
"Hath God said?" The insinuation was - 'God is
keeping something from you that you might have; He is
limiting you. God knows that, if you do this thing which
He has forbidden, you yourself will have the root of the
matter in yourself, you will have the capacity and
faculty in yourself for knowing, knowing, knowing. At
present, under this embargo of God, you have to depend
entirely upon Him: you have to consult Him, refer to Him,
defer to Him; you have got to get everything from Him.
And all the time you can have it in yourself, and God
knows that. You see, God is withholding something from
you that you might have, and you are less of a being than
you might be - so God is not really favourable to you and
your interests.'
It was a maligning of God. But the focal
point was this: 'You, YOU - you can BE something,
you can DO something, you can be "in
the know" about things' - self-centredness,
self-interest, self-realisation, and all the other host
of 'self' aspects. The 'I' awoke, that 'I' which had
brought the enemy out of his first estate. 'I will
be exalted above the stars, I will be equal with
the Most High'. To awaken the 'I' in man - so that,
instead of man having his centre in God, deriving
everything from God, he aspired to have the centre in
himself; instead of being God-centred, he was
self-centred - that was the focal point. And man was
enticed into the same pride as had brought about Satan's
downfall, leading to the same act of independence -
nothing less than a bid for personal freedom from God.
As to the results, well, we know them. The
older this world becomes, and the greater the development
of this race, the more and more terrible is the
manifestation of this original thing. We see a picture of
man trying to get on without God, man saying that he CAN
get on without God; man seeking to realise himself,
fulfil himself, and to draw everything to himself;
seeking to be himself the centre of everything, not only
individually but collectively. That is the story, that is
the history. The results? Look at the world - all the
terrible, terrible suffering, all the misery, all the
horror. We should never have believed, had it not become
an actuality in recent years, what man is capable of
doing - all because of his break with God. We will not
dwell upon it; it is too awful. If we ask, Why, why
should all this suffering and misery and wretchedness go
on in the world? - surely the answer is this. God can
never remove from man the consequences of this act of
pride and disobedience, independence and complicity with
His arch-enemy, without letting man go on in his
independence. All this is God's way of saying - the way
in which He is compelled to say - It is an awful, awful
thing, to be without God, to be in a state of breach with
God.
Now suppose you come into the Christian
life. That does not remove all the misery and suffering
in the creation, and it does not remove the suffering
from yourself, but there is a difference. The mighty
difference between one who is outside of Christ and one
who is in Christ is this: both suffer, but whereas the
one suffers unto despair and hopelessness, in the
sufferings of the other there is the grace of God turning
it all to account to make him or her Godlike again. The
others suffer without hope, die without hope, but the
sufferings of a Christian are to make that one like their
Lord. It is a marvellous thing to see the likeness of
Christ coming out in His own through their sufferings.
THE INCARNATION OF THE LORD JESUS
We come now to the next phase of things -
the incarnation of our Lord Jesus: for it is just at that
point - the incarnation - that all that was appointed for
Him, all the Divine design and conception of God's Son in
this universe, all the creative activity through Him and
by Him and unto Him, and all the meaning of man's
creation, as we have been trying to show, is taken up in
a definite way for realisation.
This incarnation, the coming of the Lord
Jesus into this world, is a far, far greater thing than
any of us has yet appreciated. The Word of God makes a
great deal of this coming into the world. You know that,
at a certain season of the year, we are talking all the
time about the birth of Jesus - about Jesus being born in
Bethlehem. There is much about that in our carols and in
our talk. It is all about the birth of Jesus. But the
Word of God, while it uses that phrase, "Now when
Jesus was born in Bethlehem...", says far, far more
than that about His coming. That was not the BEGINNING
of Jesus: that was the COMING of Jesus. He
definitely and deliberately and consciously, in that full
form of His eternal existence with God, made a decision
about this matter, a deliberate decision to come. Coming
in baby form had its own particular meaning - we cannot
now stay with all the details of this - but it was a
coming.
And what the Word of God says first of all
about that coming is that it was a mighty, mighty
renunciation on His part. Listen again. "Who,
existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied
himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the
likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he
humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea,
the death of the cross" (Phil. 2:6-8). And there is
a clear implication in that sentence in His great prayer:
"Father, glorify thou me... with the glory which I
had with thee before the world was" (John 17:5). He
has let it go, He has given it up. That was the mighty
renunciation by God's Son of His heavenly, eternal glory,
of His position of equality - down to what? Servanthood.
The word is 'bond-servant': a bond-slave, the form of a
bond-slave. You and I cannot grasp all that, because we
cannot grasp what it meant for Him to be equal with God.
We cannot understand all that He was and had in the
eternity past. We know so little about that; we
understand less. But here it is: it has all been
renounced, and He is now here in incarnation, not as a
master, but as a bond-slave. "The Son of man",
said He, "came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister" (Matt. 20:28). "I am in the midst of
you as he that serveth" (Luke 22:27). "He took
a towel, and girded himself. Then he poureth water into
the bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet"
(John 13:4,5). That was the job of the slave, the
bond-slave.
The next part of the statement as to this
cycle from glory to glory is - "being found in
fashion as a man". This just relates to the central
feature and inclusive meaning of the Incarnation: i.e.,
to all that is meant by the fact that everything was by
Man - as man - for man. There were many theophanies in
Old Testament times (theos = God; phaino = to
show), manifestations of God to man by actual
appearances (some believe that these were the Second
Person of the Trinity, but that need not be discussed
here). But the Incarnation is something different, and
its essential point is that the great work of redemption
was not committed to angels, but, as the hymn goes:
'O generous love! that He, who smote
In man for man the foe,
The double agony in man
For man should undergo.'
It was Man for man assuming responsibility
for this state of things, and for the recovery of what
was lost and the reinstating of what had been forfeited,
the redeeming of man and creation. For that He became
incarnate, and then straight to the Cross. He had no
illusions about that - He had come for that. One of His
great imperatives was always related to the Cross.
"The Son of man MUST be delivered up... and
be crucified" (Luke 24:7). That imperative was in
His heart as overruling and overriding everything else.
He knew it, and that is why He repudiated and rejected
the cheap offer of the kingdoms of this world at the
hands of the Devil: because He had come, not to have them
as they were, but to have them as God ever intended them
to be, and that could only be by the Cross.
So the Cross was the great repudiation of
the world as it was and is, the great repudiation of man
as he had become, whom God could not accept, in whose
heart was found this pride. For, representatively, in the
judgment and death of Jesus Christ God was saying
concerning the whole race, 'I have finished with that',
and turning His face away. The heart of the Son was
broken as He cried, 'Thou hast forsaken Me!' Why? Because
He was there as man's representative, the world's
representative as it was, and He had to die as it. He
"tasted death for every man", which meant
experiencing God-forsakenness, repudiation, and the
closed door of Heaven, God's eternal 'No' to that fallen
creation. By that means He redeemed man, He redeemed the
creation, and in His resurrection-ascension to the right
hand of God He reinstated man, representatively, in the
place that God ever intended man to have. This is not all
isolated action on the part of Jesus Christ. This is
related all the time. He is the inclusive One, and what
happens to Him is what God means to happen to man. Until
man is in Christ he is repudiated by God. There is no way
through. "No one cometh unto the Father, but by
me" (John 14:6). But in Christ the inheritance which
was lost is recovered. In Christ, personally at God's
right hand as his representative, man is reinstated.
Christ is there as the earnest of what we shall be and
where we shall be, by the grace of God. But, mark you,
the Christ risen is not now the Christ made sin in our
place, but with sin put away, and a new creation
instated, though still MAN.
Well, all this is the setting of the
Christian life; this is the background of a Christian. Is
it not immense? We struggle for words in order to try to
set it forth, it is so great. All I can hope to do is to
leave an impression on you. I cannot explain, I cannot
define, I cannot set it out, I cannot convey it; but all
this, which is so poor an expression, surely, surely,
should leave at least an impression upon us. We should at
least grasp this - that a Christian is set in an eternal
background. It is a wonderful thing to be converted and
to become a Christian; it is blessed to be saved; but oh!
our conception and experience of the Christian life is
such a little thing compared with God's thought. We need
to get the eternal dimensions of the significance of
Jesus Christ as the setting of a Christian life.
Christianity does not begin when we accept
Christ. By accepting Christ we are placed right back
there in the eternity of God's thought concerning man. We
are brought into something that has been from all
eternity in the intention of God, and, as we shall see
later, linked on with a realisation unspeakably wonderful
in the ages to come. To become a child of God, to be born
again, however you may define or explain it, is to come
right into something that is first of all not of time at
all - it is of eternity. It is not just this little life
here on earth; it is of Heaven, it is universal in its
significance. It is a wonderful thing, beyond all our
powers of grasping, to be a Christian. If we could only
get some conception of the cost of our salvation, the
cost of redemption, the cost of recovering the lost
inheritance; the cost to God, the cost to God's Son - the
awful depths of that Cross; if only we could get some
idea of this, we should see that it is no little thing to
be a Christian. It is something immense.
What I have said has not been outside the
Word of God; I have been keeping closely to the Book. I
have not turned you from passage to passage, but there is
a vast amount of Scripture behind what I have said. All
that I have given you, and more, is in the Word of God.
And the important thing is that what I have said can be
put to the test - it can be made true in experience, now,
in this life. That is just the wonder of it: a truly
born-from-above child of God knows within himself or
herself, 'This is true; this is why I have a being; now I
have the explanation, and much more.'
Now if this is true, if all that is the
meaning of being in Christ - and I put the 'if' by way of
argument - what an immense challenge it is to be a
Christian, and what a terrible thing it will be not to be
in Christ. What an immense thing it will prove to be, not
only in this life, but more, infinitely more, in the ages
to come, to be in Christ!
If there is one reading these lines who is
not yet in Christ, it is a challenge to you. You are not
dealing merely with your father's or your mother's
beliefs or faith. You are not dealing with something that
you call 'Christianity', or with your own conception of a
Christian, which may be all wrong, faulty, or at most
inadequate. You are dealing with a vast thing, an immense
thing. May God help you, from this contemplation of the
setting of the Christian life, to reach out, if you have
never yet done so, to embrace God's gift. If we know what
it is to be in Christ, let us make sure that we are set
upon knowing all that the Christian life means, that we
are not going to be content with a little Christian life,
with anything less than God's fullness for us; and if we
have a lot of experience and knowledge, let this all lead
us to a new determination that we shall not stop short
anywhere of God's full and ultimate intention in
apprehending us in His Son.