The Christ Life

F.B. Meyer gave a series of addresses in 1897 in the northeastern part of the United States on the deepening of the Christian life. The addresses were recorded in a book called The Christ Life for Your Life. He reminds us that it is the living Christ in us who makes all the difference:

"You have not . . . to worry about the death side; think about the life side. Do not live looking at the corpse, but live looking to the Holy Ghost; and as you trust Him for every movement, as you breathe in the Holy Ghost moment by moment as you breathe in air, in the depth of your heart He will draw you away from the flesh, the self, the world, the devil; and insensibly, unconsciously, exquisitely, He will bring you into life. And the more you live on the life side, the more, without knowing much of it, you will live on the death side; for while you are engrossed with the Holy Ghost, the Holy Ghost in the depth of your being is carrying the sentence of death deeper, deeper, deeper down, and things are being mortified of which you once had no conception.

"Now listen: If you choose the cross, if you live in the Spirit, the Spirit lusts (always the present tense), lusteth against the flesh. I do not know how your Bible reads, but some Bibles are printed wrong. 'The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh,' and 'Spirit' is spelled with a small s. Take some ink and alter that. It is not 'spirit' with a small s; it is 'Spirit' with a capital S, the Holy Spirit. 'The flesh, the self, lusts against the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit lusts against the flesh.'

"Now, let us look at five texts in Galatians on the inner life, the indwelling Christ.

"1. Galatians 1:15,16: 'When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.' 'It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.' Now, 'to reveal' means 'to undrape.' There is a statue. It is covered with a veil. It is there, but hidden. I take off the veil, and you see it. When you were regenerate, Christ came unto you; that is what regeneration means--Christ born into your spirit. But Christ came in as a veiled figure, and you who are regenerate, but who have never seen the Christ as I put Him before you in the last address, you have Christ in you, but He is veiled. Now, mark. When Jesus died, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and when the soul appreciates the death of Christ as its own death to sin, the veil is rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the Holy Ghost reveals Jesus as the Substitute for the self-life.

"'It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.' O, my God, I thank Thee that Thou hast revealed Thy Son as the Alpha, the pivot, the fountain, the origin of my life! May it be so with us all!

"A friend of mine was staying near Mont Blanc. He had been there for a fortnight, but had not seen the 'monarch of the Alps.' Nearly out of heart with waiting, he was prepared to leave. Going up to dress for dinner, he passed a window and saw that the monarch was still veiled in mist. Having dressed, he came down-stairs, passing the window again. Every vestige of mist had now parted, and Mont Blanc stood revealed from base to snow-clad peak. So now there shall come upon you a breath of the Holy Ghost, before which the misconception of your life shall pass, and to you God will reveal His Son in you as the center of your life.

"Turn for a moment to Colossians 1:27, a very favorite passage: 'To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.'

". . . Jesus come! You have come, but You are a mystery. But we have come to the cross, and the mystery is gone, and there is the glory of the day; but there will be the riches of the glory of the mystery, Christ in us; and He will do for us better than ever we could have done for ourselves.

"2. Galatians 1:24: 'They glorified God in me.' Some young men belonging to the Salvation Army came to old Andrew Bonar and said, 'Dr. Bonar, we have been all night with God. Can't you see our faces shine?'

"The old man said, 'Moses wist not that his face shone.'

"When you have got the real article you do not need to advertise it, the public will come for it; but the man who has got what we call in England, brummagem ware, a sham, must puff it. If you have got Christ in you, people will not glorify you, they will glorify Christ in you, and they will say, 'Teach us about Christ who has made you so fair.'

"'They glorified God in me.' Dear brother ministers, when you get this, they will not glorify your sermons, they will not glorify your eloquence; but they will glorify God who shines through you as the Shekinah shone through the temple of old.

"3. Galatians 2:8: 'The same was mighty in me.' Hudson Taylor told me that on the threshold of his great life-work God came to him and said, 'My child, I am going to evangelize inland China, and if you like to walk with me I will do it through you.'

"'Mighty in me.' I cannot take that Bible class, but Christ is in me, and HE can. I cannot conduct that mission, but Christ is in me, and HE can. I cannot assume the responsibilities, but hallelujah! it does not matter. A copper wire has only to convey the message, it is for the battery to send it; and you may be forever more like the wire which connects you with these cities far down its course, the wire along which the fair and the false passes without fret, without anxiety, without care; a mighty, mighty force meeting in the wire. When it is not self but Christ, it is Christ 'mighty in me.'

"4. Galatians 2:20: 'Christ liveth in me.' One day when traveling by train, a young man sat opposite me in the car, reading Thomas a' Kempis' Imitation of Christ. I knew the book, and sat beside him and said, 'A grand book.'

"He said, 'Yes.'

"Said I, 'I have found something better.'

"'Better?'

"'Yes.'

"'How?'

"'Better for me, because I was always a poor hand at imitation. I imitated the minister with whom I settled from college, and nobody but myself and my wife ever guessed that my sermons were imitations of his. When I was a boy, my father had me taught drawing, and my master put before me something, and my copy needed to have letter-press underneath to state it was an imitation of the copy. And when I sat down to imitate Christ, no one could have guessed what I was trying to attain. 'But,' said I, 'my young friend, if my drawing-master could have infused the spirit of his skill into my brain and hand, he could have drawn through me as fair a drawing as his own; and if my great and noble friend could have only put his spirit into me, why should I not have spoken even as he? And if instead of imitating Christ far away in the glory, he will come by the Holy Ghost and dwell in me, by His grace He shall work through my poor yielded life, a life something like His own fair life.' Christ liveth in me.

"Many have no idea what religion is. Re-ligion, re-ligo, a Latin word meaning, 'I bind,'--it is the binding of the heart to the Lord. No, I recall that; it is better: 'He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.' O Christ, Thou art one with me, to make me one with Thee world without end!

"5. One verse more. Galatians 4:19: 'My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.' You know, of course, that an egg has in it a little embryo of life, and the nutriment the viscous fluid upon which it shall grow; and every day the little life germ pecks into this more and more, and the chick is formed in the shell. Until now there has been a good deal more of other elements in your life than of Christ, but from now the Christ is going to grow and increase and absorb into Himself everything else, and be formed in you.

"Brother ministers, will you forgive that I have stated the truths of Christ's holy gospel so imperfectly? How can human words tell what Christ is prepared to be? But let me entreat you to pass by a great deal of political life, and it may be, (though it is not wrong), of the social life around you; and I charge you to live to preach the deep philosophy of the indwelling Christ, and let men know what Jesus meant when He said, 'In that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you.'"