You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Christ is your life. When He appears, then you, too, will appear with Him in glory. (Colossians 3:3,4 GW)
We are very often inclined to think that the
Life of the Lord in us needs in some way to be improved, to be added to, when
really what is required is that we should discover what we have, and,
discovering it by experience, live according to it. This Life is not something
apart from the Lord Jesus, and we can never think of His standing in need of
some improvement, nor of the possibility of something being added to Him to make
Him complete, or more complete. We would never think like that. And this Life is
one with Himself. As the Apostle says, it is Christ who is our Life, and our
need is to discover what Christ is in us, and to live accordingly. So in a very
real sense it is a matter of the Life getting more of us, rather than of our
getting more of the Life. That, at any rate, is the way of its working.
This, in the ordering of God, has to be done in a world where death still rules
and works; for in this world the destruction of death has not yet been made
manifest. Death, like the devil, goes on, although Calvary still remains full
victory. We are left in this world, and it is in this world where death reigns
and works as a great energy that we, by this sovereign ordering of God, have to
come to prove the values of the Life which has been deposited in us, and to
discover its potentialities. This is an experimental discovery. It therefore
resolves itself into battle between that which is in this world and the Life
which is in the believer. It is the battle for Life, not as to the forfeiture of
that Life – not as to whether death can take eternal Life away from us, for that
is not the question at issue – but as to the triumphant expression and the full
manifestation of the power of that Life. That is the issue.