The Abiding Life

In 1908, A. B. Simpson wrote the following article:

"The after-Easter days which the Lord Jesus spent with His disciples on earth have always seemed to us prophetic and significant of our abiding life with the Lord to-day. Not with a sudden flash of supernal light and glory, but with a lingering and tender farewell did the Lord Jesus leave His first disciples, hovering, as it seemed, midway between earth and heaven, visiting them at intervals with words of instruction and greetings of love, and yet absent from them in the flesh most of the time and gradually teaching and training them to walk by faith and not by sight and to learn that higher fellowship in the spirit which was so soon to become their normal experience. The prayer of the two disciples at Emmaus, 'Abide with us,' recalls the Master's own message just before He went to the cross, 'Abide in Me and I in you,' and expresses perhaps as no other phrase the believer's walk with the Lord during His earthly pilgrimage. Let us dwell a little on this divine picture of our Christian life expressed in our text ['Abide in Me and I in you.'] and illustrated in the beautiful context, the story of Emmaus.

"1. Our relationship to Christ begins with the first three words, 'Abide in Me.' To be in Christ is not quite the same as to have Christ in us. It describes a relationship by virtue of which Christ represents us to God, standing for us as our Surety, and settling for us all the questions at issue between us and God on account of our fallen, sinful condition. In Christ there is no condemnation because He has assumed our guilt and settled our justification. In Christ our standing is as good as His, for 'we are accepted in the beloved,' and beloved even as He. In Christ we are known in heaven apart from our unworthiness and sin as members of the body of Christ and enjoy access to the Father in His name and may claim in answer to believing prayer all that His merits command. In Christ we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, and already our place is prepared and our kingdom assured.

Oh, what a wonderful place
Jesus has given to me,
Saved by His glorious grace,
I may be "even as He."

"2. The next phrase, 'and I in you,' describes a deeper relationship. It is the actual union of the soul with Christ by virtue of which He Himself actually enters and resides within us as the Source of all our spiritual life. To be in Christ justifies us, but to have Christ in us sanctifies us. To be in Christ gives us peace with God, but to have Christ in us brings us 'the peace of God which passeth all understanding.' To be in Christ makes us the objects of God's love, but to have Christ in us sheds abroad that love within us and enables us to live in His love and love God and others even as He. To be in Christ delivers us from the curse of sin, but to have Christ in us brings us all the blessing of the heavenly life in all its fulness and makes us partakers even now of the foretaste of the heaven to come.

"When does this great and blessed experience come to a believing soul? Is it the common inheritance of all Christians or is it a special blessing to be sought by entire believing assurance? What does the word teach us? 'At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father and ye in Me and I in you.' What day is that? It is the day when the Holy Ghost comes, so that coming of the Comforter is equivalent to the incoming of Christ. The Master intimates as much when He says immediately after the promise of the Comforter, 'I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you.' When pressed by one of His disciples for a fuller explanation of this mystery of His indwelling, the Lord Jesus explains in the fourteenth chapter of John, that to the heart that loves Him and keeps His commandments, implying an utter abandonment and self-surrender to a life of implicit obedience and consecrated service, He would give a special manifestation of His presence. 'I will love him,' He says, 'and will manifest Myself unto him.' And later He adds, 'My Father will love him and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.' In the Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul tells those disciples who were already Christians that he was travailing 'in birth for them until Christ should be formed in them.' This was evidently more than their salvation. And in the Epistle to the Ephesians it is plain that this experience of the indwelling Christ marks a crisis in our spiritual life. 'That he would strengthen you with might by His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith . . . that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God.' Surely it is plain from these passages that the incoming and indwelling of the Lord Jesus Christ is connected with the deeper experience of entire surrender and entire sanctification, and that it is no cheap, commonplace thing which we may lightly take for granted, but is the reward of consecration, faith and holy obedience.

"What does this blessed experience bring to us? It brings to us a new supernatural and divine life. Henceforth it is true, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.' Henceforth our faith, our love, our joy, our peace, our purity, our victory, our prayer, our service, are not the efforts of our struggling human nature, but the inworking and the outworking of the Lord Jesus Christ who 'worketh in us to will and to do of his good will and pleasure.'

"What a glorious privilege and possibility such a life affords, to exchange my weakness for His strength, my struggle for His rest, my endeavor for His omnipotence, my holiness for Him. Beloved, do you know this mystery, hid from ages and generations, but now made evident to His saints, which is, 'Christ in you, the hope of glory'?

"3. The abiding life means to continually and habitually recognize this double relationship and think and feel and act, knowing that we are in Him and He in us. We may sustain a relationship and yet, not habitually exercise it and enjoy it. That wife might presumably go back to her professional and servile duties and still continue to work for her living instead of leaning on her husband. That heir to an enormous fortune may fail to realize that the mansion and the estate have become his property and may still continue to live in his simple cottage or content himself with moving into the porter's lodge, instead of the castle which he has inherited. And so there are Christians that seem to forget that they are in Him and He in them, and they still struggle on and try to work their passage to heaven as though they were yet paupers and outcasts.

"It is a great thing to habitually remember that we are in Christ. When Satan tempts us with doubts, when we are discouraged with ourselves, when we wonder if our prayers are worthy of acceptance, beloved, let us remember that God never sees us in ourselves, but always in Him and for His sake counts us accepted and beloved and loves us and treats us even as His own beloved Son.

"And in like manner it is a great thing habitually to get into the full consciousness that He is in us. 'Know ye not,' the Apostle asks, 'that ye are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?' Christians often look and act as though they did not know that they carry within their bosoms a presence before which the mightiest angel veils his face with his wings. When your own inward self seems to rise and reassert itself, bid it back again to the Redeemer's grave where you have buried it and say, 'Not I, but Christ that liveth in me.' When faith or love seem beyond your reach and you cry, 'Who is sufficient for these things?' look up and say, 'Lord Jesus, Thou art my love, Thou art my faith, I can do all things through Christ who is my strength.' When you shrink from some mighty service for which your abilities are not sufficient, again remember it is no more I but the grace of Christ that is with me. 'Therefore if any man speak, let him speak as the oracle of God. If any man minister, let him do it as of the ability which God giveth, that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever.'

"In order to live this abiding life, you will have to cultivate the habit of constantly discounting and suppressing yourself. Your first impulse will be to dash in and do it yourself. The old habit of self-assertion and self-sufficiency will be there to manifest itself and not until you are brought up with a sharp turn and a humiliating failure, will you remember the Master's warning, 'Without Me ye can do nothing.' And then humbled and chastened you will rise up and march against Ai the second time, not in the strength of the flesh, but in the might of the Lord and be more than conqueror through Him that loved you.

"4. The abiding life will be a life of fellowship. The very word suggests a home, a place where we live and the Lord's sweet promise in the fifteenth chapter of John is a promise of a blessed heavenly communion. 'My Father will love him and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.' The Comforter is already there and He will bring the Father and the Son and create a little heaven with the 'love of God, the grace of the Lord Jesus and the communion of the Holy Ghost.' There is something said about prayer in the context of the fifteenth chapter of John which is indeed very wonderful. 'If ye abide in Me and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.' The word for 'will' here is a very strong one, literally meaning, to command. With Christ in our heart to inspire our prayer and give it value and force, there is no perhaps about it, but it is the prayer of faith, the mighty prayer of which our Lord once said, 'Ask Me of things to come concerning My servants and concerning the works of My hand command ye Me.' And where shall we find a more beautiful picture of communion than that walk to Emmaus, that wondrous talk and that sweeter fellowship as the Lord came in to abide, and as He blessed and broke the bread was manifested to them in all His grace and glory. Beloved, are you thus walking and talking with Jesus, enjoying the communion of the Holy Ghost?

"7. The perfect naturalness of this abiding life is exquisitely brought out in the story of Emmaus. How accidentally the Lord dropped into their company. How perfectly He adjusted Himself to their conversation and their conditions. How free from strain or high-strung transcendentalism was His introduction to them. And how He still loves 'to appear for our joy' when perhaps we are least expecting Him. There is no task so common, there is no toil so menial, there is no work so preoccupying, but the Master may come and blend with all other thoughts and things as a sweet undertone, a heavenly fragrance, a wordless joy, that makes us more efficient for our ordinary duties, and yet while 'diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord,' oh, let us send up to Him the cry,

Walk with us, Lord, through all the days,
And let us walk with Thee,
Til as Thy will is done in heaven
On earth so shall it be.

"8. In the abiding life the Lord sometimes manifests Himself in an unusual and gracious way. First He came to them as an ordinary traveling companion and addressed them though their understanding and their hearts by means of the truth which He brought to their remembrance. But before He left them, He suddenly unfolded His glory and for a moment they saw His face and their hearts were hushed with strange ecstasy and awe. But let us remember that his moment of supernal revelation could only be for a single instant. They could not have stood it longer, nor would it have been wholesome for them to live on such an exalted plane, fit only for another order of spiritual beings and that other world for which we are not yet prepared. The Lord came sometimes in like manner in sudden vision to the Apostle Paul and gave one glimpse of His glory and one intense message whose echoes lingered through all the coming years. But in a moment it was gone and the old life of simple faith and duty was assumed once more. There is a place for the vision of the Lord and the mounting up with wings like eagles, but the purpose of it is that we may come back to earth and 'run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.'

"Yes, we need these hours of vision.

"9. The normal life of abiding is a life of faith, divinely led by the Word of God and the continual remembrance of His promise and His teachings. Therefore, that journey to Emmaus was accompanied by the Master's precious teaching of the prophetic Scripture concerning Himself. And when that night He came again to the assembled disciples in the upper room, He continued to unfold the Scriptures and open their understanding that they might know the meaning of His cross, His resurrection and His glory. It is thus that faith is nourished and love is quickened until our lips murmur with them, 'Did not our hearts burn within us as He talked with us by the way and opened unto us the Scriptures?' So let us abide in Him. 'Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody in your hearts to the Lord.'

"10. Finally, the abiding life is a life of service in the power of the Holy Ghost. And so the chapter ends with the great commission 'that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in all nations beginning at Jerusalem.' As we thus abide in Him and in His blessed service, we may expect that He will often talk with us by the way and open to us the Scriptures, that He will sometimes dissolve the clouds and remove the veil and show us for a moment the glory which He hath given us, and that, by and by, when He shall appear, we shall appear with Him in glory, and have all eternity to ask Him questions which often rush to our lips and satisfy the longings for which a little longer His message is 'Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now we know in part, but then shall we know even as also we are known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.'"