I have been trying to say something, and I am realizing how easily the words I use can contradict the very thing I mean.
I speak of coming near to God, and it sounds as though He is somewhere else. I speak of receiving His help, and it sounds as though I have a life of my own that needs assistance from His. I speak of having an experience of Him, and it sounds as though we meet for a little while and then return to our separate lives.
But that is not what I mean.
We have been born of God. His Spirit dwells in our spirit. We have been joined to the Lord, and His life is our life.
I do not mean that I have become the source of divinity or that everything I think and do is therefore divine. I mean something both more intimate and more humbling: the life by which I now live has its origin in Him. He has given us Himself. We are His children by birth, sharing the life of the One of whom we have been born.
This is where I want to begin, because otherwise everything that follows can quietly become another account of a human being trying to reach God.
That distance has been overcome in Christ.
We are in Him, and He is in us.
I would like my words to stop putting back a separation that He has removed.
When I consider what God has wanted from the beginning, this birth seems inseparable from His purpose.
He wanted a counterpart for His Son, a bride who could share His life and answer His love. She could not become that counterpart merely by being instructed about Him. No amount of religious education could give her the life from which such a relationship could grow.
She had to be born of Him.
This makes the Christian life something far more extraordinary than I have often allowed it to be. We have spoken of conversion, forgiveness, changed behavior, and a new direction. All of these have their place. But underneath them is an actual birth.
There is a life in us that did not originate in us.
Zoe. The genuine life of God.
I sometimes wonder whether we have softened this until it sounds like a poetic way of describing religious influence. We say that Christ is our life, but then proceed as though He has given us principles for living our own.
Yet Paul’s language is much more intimate than that. In Galatians 2:20 he speaks of Christ living in him. In Colossians 3:4 he speaks of Christ as our life. And in 1 Corinthians 6:17 he says that the person joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.
I cannot make those words mean merely that God encourages me.
There is union here. There is a shared life.
And I think much of our confusion begins when we acknowledge this in our teaching while continuing to speak, pray, and live as though it had never happened.
Before the foundation of the world, the Father loved the Son.
I find myself returning to that because it places everything within a relationship older than creation. Before there was a world, there was love. Before there was human failure, there was the delight of the Father in the Son.
And now, in the Son, we belong within that fellowship.
We have not been left outside to admire it.
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 reaches further than I know how to explain. He speaks of us being in the Father and the Son, of Himself in us, and of the Father’s love in us. The language keeps drawing us inward, into a participation that our ordinary religious vocabulary scarcely knows how to hold.
We are accustomed to distance. Someone greater than us has something we lack, and we approach carefully, hoping to obtain it.
But here the Son has brought us into His own relationship with the Father. His Spirit is in us. We cry to the Father from within the life of His Son.
We are children at home in a relationship into which we have been born.
I know that Scripture also speaks of adoption and the standing of sonship. But I do not want our use of that language to leave the impression that we remain unrelated inwardly, given a legal place while possessing none of the Father’s life.
We have been born of God (John 1:12–13).
That is the reality I want to preserve. His fatherhood is more than a title, and our sonship is more than a status.
This is why the thought of the ecclesia has become so immense to me.
What is God gaining through all these lives in whom His Son lives?
A corporate expression of that same life. A people whose oneness is deeper than agreement, affection, or a shared religious history.
We may have those things, or we may struggle with them. But our underlying oneness was not created by our ability to get along. We have been born of the same Father and share the same Spirit. Christ is the life of each member.
The members of the ecclesia are already related inwardly before they arrange anything outwardly.
That seems important to me because we spend so much effort trying to produce unity from the outside. We establish common language, common activities, common expectations. Sometimes these make cooperation easier. But they cannot create the oneness for which Jesus prayed.
They cannot give us a common life.
He has already done that.
Our life together is the unfolding of something given, something real within us that becomes expressed in our relationships. We learn to live from what we share in Christ rather than from everything that separates us in our natural dispositions.
I am not saying this is effortless. I know too much about my own reactions to say that. But the difficulty does not mean the life is absent.
It means there are many places in me where I still live as though my old resources were all I had.
I look at the vastness of creation and wonder about the desire behind it.
There are ages we cannot picture and distances we can scarcely comprehend. I cannot explain the purpose of every event in that enormous history. But Scripture tells us that all things were created through Christ and for Him, and that this same Christ loves the church and gave Himself for her (Colossians 1:16; Ephesians 5:25).
I find it difficult to put those things together without feeling that the ecclesia belongs to the deepest meaning of creation.
At the end of Scripture, we are shown a bride. We are shown God dwelling with humanity. The long history has not ended in a completed educational program or a perfectly administered religious society.
There is a people filled with Him.
I sometimes use the word counterpart because it expresses something I am afraid we have lost. God’s desire is personal. The bride shares the Bridegroom’s life. She knows Him from within their union.
Sometimes I reach for the word queen, trying to express her belovedness and her place with Him. I know the word can be misunderstood. But I am reaching for something beyond a servant waiting at a distance for the next assignment.
She belongs with Him.
Everything about her life comes from Him, yet it has truly become hers. He has not loaned it to her for special occasions.
And we belong to this.
Ordinary people, with our histories and weaknesses and unfinished understanding, have been born into something that reaches beyond anything we could have imagined for ourselves.
If this is God’s purpose, then I want to say plainly what follows for me.
Nothing has ultimate meaning apart from Christ as our life and His expression in the ecclesia.
That does not make the people around me unimportant. It changes the place from which I live with them.
My marriage is not the source of my life. My family cannot be that source. Neither can my work, my education, my usefulness, or my reputation. I already have a life, and that life is Christ.
How much trouble I create when I forget this.
I ask another person to give me the reassurance that my existence matters. I need a conversation to go well so that I can be at peace. I need to be understood, appreciated, or proved right. Something ordinary becomes inwardly enormous because I have attached my life to it.
Yet my life is not hanging upon that outcome.
It is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3).
I do not have to acquire another life before I can love the person in front of me. I can live from the One who is already my life.
I find that both searching and relieving. It exposes the way I keep trying to draw life from things that cannot supply it. But it also releases those things from a burden I should never have placed upon them.
My wife does not have to become the keeper of my inward peace. My work does not have to justify my existence. The response to something I have written does not determine whether my life has value.
Christ is our life before any of these things go well or badly.
For years, I understood Christian living largely as an effort to do what God wanted.
I heard that I should love, and I tried to love. I heard that I should be patient, and I attempted to restrain myself. I heard about the church being built up, and I tried to make myself useful.
I was sincere. But sincerity did not change the assumption beneath it all: God had the expectation, and I had to find the ability.
Sometimes I added prayer to that arrangement. I asked Him to help me do what I already intended to accomplish. The language was spiritual, but the basic picture remained unchanged. There was my life, inadequate but determined, and His life somewhere beyond mine, available to assist.
I no longer think that describes what He has given us.
Christ does not merely strengthen an independent Christian life. He is our life.
The branch does not have a separate supply to which the vine contributes when necessary. The life of the vine is the life within the branch. The branch is genuinely alive because that life is its own living supply.
This is what makes the Lord’s picture in John 15 so precious to me.
He is describing an organic relationship, something already joined. The fruit comes from the life within that union.
I do not need to persuade Him to become my life whenever a difficulty appears. I need to cease assuming that I must face the difficulty from a life apart from Him.
That is a very different beginning.
Abiding, then, is not an attempt to cross a distance.
It is living in the union that is already ours.
I need to be careful even here because I can turn abiding into an achievement. I can begin watching myself, asking whether I am inward enough, quiet enough, conscious enough of the Lord.
Before long, I am occupied with my success at abiding rather than with Christ.
But union does not begin when I become aware of it. His life does not arrive when my thoughts settle down. My awareness may change many times in a day; the fact of His indwelling is not changing with it.
Sometimes I discover that I have been inwardly arguing for an hour. I have rehearsed what I should have said and imagined what I will say next. Then I become quiet.
I have not brought Christ back from somewhere.
I have ceased, for a moment, to live as though I were alone.
That is how I understand the turning. It is an acknowledgment of the life already present, a yielding within the relationship already established.
Sometimes there are words. Often there are very few. The quiet is precious because I am no longer trying to supply everything from myself.
I do not have to create His presence.
I am in Him.
This changes prayer for me.
I can still tell the Father what troubles me. I can speak plainly about pain, confusion, and the needs of people I love. Sonship does not make us unable to ask. It changes the relationship from which the asking comes.
I am not trying to get the attention of someone from whom I have been excluded.
I am speaking within the life of the Son.
Sometimes I think the deepest change in prayer is simply that the distance disappears from our understanding. There may still be a need. There may still be sorrow. But we are not calling across an empty space, hoping the words will reach Him.
The Spirit is already within us.
I have found myself wanting to explain less in prayer. I do not mean that speaking is wrong. I mean that I have spent much of my life talking as though the relationship depended upon my ability to keep the conversation going.
Now there are times when I am content to be quiet within it.
There is no need to make something happen before the Father and I can be together. In Christ, we are together.
I would like more of my living to have that simplicity.
When I speak of the heavenly realm, I mean this reality in which our life is already held.
I do not mean an occasional spiritual visit. Nor do I mean pretending that the ordinary world is unreal. I still go to work. I still get tired. There are responsibilities, misunderstandings, bills, and things that break.
But these circumstances do not contain the whole of my existence.
We have been raised with Christ. Our life belongs to Him, and we live on earth within that union.
I can forget this almost immediately when something irritates me. The smallest inconvenience can become my entire world. But the narrowness of my awareness does not define the extent of what God has done.
That matters to me.
Otherwise, I spend my life judging spiritual reality by my feelings. A peaceful morning means He is near. A difficult afternoon means I have somehow lost Him.
But the life of God is not so fragile.
I may be unsettled while His life remains mine. I may be grieving without having fallen outside our union. I may have no words and very little strength, yet still be His child, born of Him, held in His Son.
Abiding includes resting in that reality, even when my emotions have not caught up.
And this life is shared with the brothers and sisters.
We are not separate spiritual individuals who occasionally arrange to encourage one another. We are members of one Body. The Christ who lives in me is the Christ who lives in them.
That makes our fellowship more than a useful addition to private devotion.
Something of our shared life becomes expressed among us. Someone speaks from Christ, and the whole gathering is nourished. Someone listens without defending himself, and there is room for an honesty that had been missing. A burden is carried together.
We are living as members of one another.
I have known moments like this that were so ordinary there was almost nothing to describe afterward. Nobody gave an exceptional message. Nobody appeared especially spiritual. Yet there was a sweetness among us that did not depend upon anyone’s performance.
I think of the morning prayers with two or three in the prayer closets.
What remains precious is the simplicity of being together in Him. We were not trying to bring an absent Lord into the room. We were sharing the life that was already ours.
I would not want to turn the memory into a formula. The room, the hour, and the number of people were not the source of the sweetness.
Christ was our common life.
We had time to be there together without covering that reality with so many other concerns.
I hesitate to call the ecclesia the engine of this life. God’s life is the living power within her. The brothers and sisters do not generate it. But neither are they merely standing outside one another, handing out encouragement.
We are joined.
His life is expressed through the members, and we participate in it together. One member’s openness matters to the others. One person’s living from Christ can refresh the whole atmosphere of a gathering.
We do not always understand how much we affect one another.
A brother becomes free to admit that he is struggling, and others no longer feel compelled to pretend. A sister speaks a few words from her own living, and something we have heard many times becomes inwardly clear.
No one owns this.
No one can claim to be the person through whom everyone else must receive Christ.
The life belongs to the whole Body because Christ is the life of every member.
I find that beautiful. It gives room to people who would never command attention by natural ability. They are not lesser members waiting for the important people to supply everything.
The same life is in them.
I think this is part of what makes the distortion of church life so sad.
We can take people in whom Christ lives and train them to behave as though their principal responsibility is to receive from a few gifted men.
We can keep them occupied with meetings, lessons, and approved ways of speaking while scarcely acknowledging the life already within them.
Then they may spend years believing that spiritual reality belongs chiefly to someone else.
The teacher knows. The minister sees. The ordinary believer listens and tries to follow.
I cannot reconcile that comfortably with a Body in which every member shares the life of Christ.
There are gifts, and I am grateful for them. Some people can express things with unusual clarity. Some have a depth of experience from which others benefit greatly. But their service should make us more conscious of Christ as our own life.
I become concerned when it makes us less confident that we can live in Him without their continual explanation.
A ministry can describe union while producing dependence upon the minister.
That is a painful contradiction.
And the gifted person may not see it, especially when the dependence is expressed as appreciation and faithfulness. It can feel like love. It can be difficult to relinquish.
But surely the brothers and sisters must remain free to live from the Christ who is in them.
The same question reaches our use of Scripture.
I treasure the Bible. But I can approach it as though life were absent and the accumulation of knowledge would eventually produce it.
Jesus spoke of people searching the Scriptures while refusing to come to Him for life (John 5:39–40). I do not want to repeat that in a Christian form, with correct teaching about the indwelling Christ replacing the actual living of that indwelling.
The words bear witness to the One who is already our life.
They open our understanding. They expose falsehood. They give expression to realities we may have scarcely recognized. But knowing the explanation is not the same as living from what has been explained.
I can understand the vine and branches and still spend the afternoon relying entirely upon myself.
I can explain oneness while treating another believer as someone fundamentally outside my life.
I can speak of divine birth and continue praying as though I were a stranger hoping for admission.
This is where I need honesty.
I do not necessarily need another explanation. I may need to let the truth I already know unsettle the way I have been living.
And so I question the place we give to trainings, conferences, lectures, and religious learning.
They may serve us. But they cannot supply a birth that has already taken place, nor can they improve upon the life we have been given.
Sometimes I wonder whether our continual instruction inadvertently teaches people to postpone living.
After the next training, after sufficient understanding, after more preparation, perhaps we will be ready.
But Christ is our life now.
A young believer may understand very little and yet live with a lovely openness to Him. An older believer may have accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge and become increasingly occupied with that knowledge.
The answer cannot simply be more information.
We need room to live from the divine life already in us, room to speak honestly, room to discover together what our union with Christ means in an actual day.
I am getting older, and I feel this personally. I do not want to use the years that remain preparing indefinitely for a life I have already been given.
Even our care for people who do not know the Lord belongs here.
The life within us is the life of the One who loves them. His love is not an assignment sent from a distance. As we live from Him, that love has expression through us.
I do not mean we will always know what to say. Often, listening may be the most honest thing we can do.
But I want to see the person before me, rather than immediately seeing a result I ought to obtain.
People are not accomplishments. Their coming to Christ is not proof of my usefulness.
We are speaking of a birth into divine life, an entrance into the fellowship of the Father and the Son. It is too precious to be reduced to a number or an organizational gain.
And those who are born of God do not then need to be trained into permanent dependence upon us.
They share the life we share.
We can walk together as brothers and sisters.
I know that this understanding does not make every part of my living an expression of Christ.
I would not want to claim that. I can be impatient, defensive, absorbed in my own concerns. I can write about oneness while quietly rehearsing my grievances against another person.
But the answer is not to return to the assumption that I possess only a deficient human life and must persuade God to lend me something better.
His life is already mine.
The cross reaches the insistence with which I continue to act independently. It touches my need to control, my attachment to being right, my determination to protect a certain picture of myself.
I find this uncomfortable. There are things I yield very slowly.
Yet I do not have to invent a selfless version of myself. I can let go of my claim to be the source and live from Christ.
Sometimes this becomes very practical. I can stop preparing my defense and listen. I can apologize without explaining why the other person made me act that way. I can allow a conversation to end without securing the acknowledgment I wanted.
These are small things, but they are where much of my life actually happens.
The Christ in us is sufficient for ordinary living. We do not need to reserve our understanding of union for prayer and then conduct the rest of the day as though we were on our own.
This is also why I cannot use the primacy of the ecclesia to excuse neglect of my wife, my family, or the people whose lives touch mine.
The life we share with God is love.
If I speak of the bride while becoming unavailable to the person beside me, my words have outrun my living.
Marriage is not my ultimate source or purpose. But within it, Christ can be expressed in attentiveness, patience, honesty, and practical care. Work is not my life. But Christ is my life while I work.
I do not have to choose between the reality of union and the ordinary responsibilities of the day.
Those responsibilities are among the places where that union is lived.
What I want to relinquish is the belief that they can supply my identity or become the reason for my existence. They find their proper place within the life already given to us.
That is a freedom I would like to know more deeply.
I also need to be careful that my sorrow over Christianity does not become another occupation that draws my attention away from this life.
I can become very articulate about what is wrong.
I can see the dependence, the pressure, the substitution of teaching for reality. Yet my ability to describe these things does not mean that I am living from Christ while describing them.
I may be drawing upon disappointment.
I may enjoy being the person who sees through something.
I have to be honest about that possibility in myself.
The brothers and sisters whose practices trouble me still share this life. They are not outside the Body because I believe they have misunderstood something. Our oneness does not depend upon their agreement with what I have written.
That checks something in me.
I want to speak plainly, but I do not want my words to harden into contempt. If what I am saying is true, then the people I am addressing are part of my own life in Christ.
I cannot treat them as strangers and remain faithful to the reality I am trying to express.
So I return to the question of what matters today.
I do not need to obtain Christ today. I do not need to bring Him near, establish a relationship, or become worthy of a life He has already given me.
I can live from Him.
I can cease assuming that I am alone within my circumstances. I can acknowledge, quietly and without trying to produce a feeling, that His life is my life.
And we can live this together.
The ecclesia becomes expressed as the life already shared among us has room in our actual relationships. We do not manufacture her by gathering enough people around an idea. We discover and live the oneness that belongs to us in Christ.
I think this is what I have been reaching toward all along.
God wanted a counterpart who would share His life. Through the Son, He has brought us into that life by birth. We are His children. The ecclesia is His corporate expression, growing into the fullness of what she has been given.
There is still growth. There is much in my living that needs to yield. But growth begins with life possessed, not life withheld.
We are born of God. His life is our life. We are one with Him.
Abiding is living there.
And gaining Christ, as I mean it, is the increasing fullness of that life in our actual living, personally and together.
I do not want to spend the rest of my years speaking as though I were waiting outside.
We have been brought into the Son.
We belong here.
