You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit – fruit that will last. (John 15:16 NIV)
The new creation is in Christ.
It is not in you, and not in me, and never will be. All that it
will mean in time, and in eternity will be through our spiritual
union with Christ. All God's fullness is in Christ. We shall
receive all that fullness, and enjoy it in a practical
out-working. But this, while we are yet here in time, will ever
be by faith's union. In eternity, where the reception of that
fullness will be unhindered, the work of faith, though not its
fruit, will have passed. But we shall never be absorbed in Christ
in the sense that we become so many Christs. It will still be
Himself as distinct Who is to be glorified. We shall never be
glorifying ourselves, neither shall we be glorified by others as
though we were Christ. Christ is not some great widespread
essence, which is going to become the constitution of a great
multitude, so that that multitude becomes a Christ in essence. It
will ever be true that Christ remains apart in His Person, though
manifested in His glory and in His excellence in the saints, and
we shall still, therefore, be worshiping Him as objective and
distinct in His own Person from ourselves.
Perhaps that hardly needs
saying. But it is very important that we should recognize that forever
God has bound up everything with His Son, and that nothing
will ever be had or enjoyed apart from Christ, while for this
present life that is only by faith in the Lord Jesus. The object
of this present emphasis is to seek, as the Lord will enable,
that there shall be an emancipation from ourselves; for that
occupation, that consideration, is always taking from
His glory. Let us ask the Lord to cut us really free from
ourselves by an unveiling and presentation of His Son to us, as
the sum total of all that ever God desires and wills.