One With Christ in Spiritual Experience

A. B. Simpson was an author, hymn writer, conference speaker, evangelist to the urban masses of New York City, and a missionary statesman.  He founded The Christian and Missionary Alliance and Nyack College.

The following is from his book The Christ Life:

"We are so apt to think of Christ as dropping down to us from heaven with a life all foreign and sublime, that we do not quite take in without much thought, the full meaning of His teachings, that He, like us, was led through all the discipline of a life of faith and dependence; that He could truly say, 'I, my own self can do nothing. As I hear, I speak. I came not to do mine own will, but the will of Him who sent me.' 'The Son can do nothing of Himself,' 'As the Father sent me and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.'

"He was dependent on the resources of prayer, communion with God, the constant supply of the Holy Spirit, just as we are, and He understands all the struggles of our spiritual life by actual affinity.

". . . Not only had He the same experience as we, but He brings us into His very experience. This is really the nature of true sanctification, that it imparts to us the sanctity of Christ.

"This is the meaning of the passage: 'He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all one.' 

"He gives us His own sanctity and makes us one with Him in His spirit of holiness. It was this that He meant when He said, 'For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be truly sanctified.'

"He consecrated Himself to us to live in us and reproduce His own pure and perfect life in our experience. Holiness is thus the indwelling of the Holy Christ, the unity of a human spirit with the spirit of Jesus."