...The Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God. (Colossians 2:19)
What is the believer? In God's
sight the believer is one in whom Christ is implanted, and God
never looks at Christ in a limited way. He always looks at Him in
an absolute way, and when Christ is implanted at the beginning of
our life it is not as though God implanted Him in a fragmentary
way. God's thought was that the end should be bound up with the
beginning, and that Christ should be All and in all. That is why
conversion is never an end in itself. It is only the first step
toward the full end of God. It defines the nature of the believer
in God's sight, that it is of Christ. You cannot make that. No
decision cards can accomplish that. You can never make men and
women Christians by inviting them to make certain decisions, to
assent mentally to certain propositions of Christian doctrine,
though perfectly true as to the Person and work of the Lord
Jesus. There has to be something which constitutes in that
individual, right at the very center of the being, a living union
with Christ, and a deposit of Christ. Anything other than that is
a false conversion. It is the depositing of Christ at the very
center of the being, with a view to His spreading to the very
circumference, that is the nature of a believer....
You see the pathetic hopelessness of trying to propagate anything by organized means
and methods which really is all of God. It simply has to grow,
it simply has to be. Ah, but when it is so it is mighty,
it is indestructible, it is incorruptible. Nothing can stand in
the way of Christ. It is that which rouses hell and the energies
of the Devil. He does not mind all the other: doctrine, work,
profession. That may often serve his ends as a great deception and
misrepresentation; but bring Christ in, bring Christ through,
realize Christ, and then you meet every force in this universe
which is antagonistic to Christ.