Standing in Christ
P^’^I^F the Christian life on earth must be one of perpetual conflict, it is not therefore one of perpetual uncertainty. For though the believer’s practical sanctification, or what he is in himself, may be the subject of constant solicitude and intense anxiety, yet his justification, or what he is in Christ, is something entirely aloof and detached from all the vicissitudes and fluctuations of Christian experience. It neither rises nor falls with the tide of feeling. It knows nothing of degrees. Christ being the standard by which it is gauged, it becomes absolute and without the possibility of change, since He is “the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever.”
Our communion may be subject to sad alternations of warmth and coldness; our love may burn strongly to-day and feebly to-morrow. But that does not change our real standing before God. We cannot now be in a state of justification and now out of it. Doubt and unfaithfulness may throw the shadow back many degrees to-day on the dial-plate of hope; but God does not look at that to determine our acceptance with Him. He sees us only in the light of the true Sun of righteousness, and that is “without variableness neither shadow of turning.”
Is then the wandering son just as near, and the faithless one just as dear, to the Father’s heart, as that son to whom He saith, “Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine” y Nay. But he is none the less a son. For sonship does not depend on fellowship, but fellowship on sonship. An apostle of free grace in degenerate times wrote, “Beloved John may have more of Christ’s affection than Philip, and a brighter crown than Philip, but he cannot have more justification than Philip. Because, though there are degrees in the affection and rewards of Christ, there can be none in his justification. A man must either have the whole or none at all; must either be justified from all things or be condemned.”
‘John Berridge.
IN CHRIST. ir;
A strong statement, indeed, and perhaps an incredible one to those who are enamored of the discipline of imceriainty as the only means of keeping the believer watchful. But it is not stronger certainly than that word of an older Apostle, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”
And is it not well for us sometimes to go around to the God-ward side of the covenant, and from much and bitter self-condemnation, enter into God’s judgment of us as it is in Christ 1 Faith has its appointed rest as well as its prescribed labor, when from the week-day toil and conflict of working out our own salvation, we may enter into our chamber of peace in the Lord, and shutting our doors about us say, “Return unto thy rest, O my soul,yj?r the Lo7’d hath dealt bountifully with thee,’ — so bountifully, if we will remember it, that in our destitution of any satisfying righteousness, Christ is of God “made unto us righteousness,” and in our emptiness of all good, “of his fullness have all we received, and grace for grace.”
Many will warn us of the peril of slothfulness and vain confidence arising from such a doctrine; and we on our part must warn such of the danger alike of a feeble faith and futile works, arising from an unestablished assurance. If faith has no standing ground except what it wins for itself; no stronghold except what it is enabled to build from time to time by its own endeavors, it can have little comfort, and can make but few conquests. And God has not ordained the matter thus. He has put a greater attainment behind us, than the most ardent disciple dares to place immediately before himself, even completeness in the Lord Jesus.
And so from every fresh manifestation of our self-incompleteness, we may retreat under cover to this gracious assurance, “Ye are complete in Him.” We may sink into Christ when we cannot rise to Him. And thus we shall be made strong and victorious through apparent defeat, as again and again —
“The steps of Faith
Fall on the seeming void and find
The Rock beneath.”
If now it be asked. How can it be true of imperfect, tempted, and failing believers that they are complete in Christ y we must find the answer in God’s gracious judgment of them as revealed by the Spirit. From this it would appear that so far as the question of the Christian’s acceptance and standing before a righteous law is concerned, God sees nothing from his throne but Christ Jesus alone and altogether. And since the believer is in Him and one with Him, he shares his place in the Father’s heart, and unworthy as he is in himself, yet he may know without a doubt that he is” accepted in the Beloved
And what a blessed word is this, “in the Beloved!’ In that voice that came from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” we may now hear God’s approving sentence upon ourselves, as well as upon our Lord. For being in Christ, the beams of the eternal love falUng upon Him must fall upon us as included in Him, thus embracing us, within the circle of the divine complacency. We cannot be loved of God apart from Christ. For the divine approval can only go out to that which is worthy, and who that ever walked the earth has been worthy, save One t Neither can we be condemned if we are in Christ. For the divine disapprobation can fall only upon what is sinful And He is without sin. To be in Him, therefore, is to be loved of the Father, because it is to be in the very focus of the divine affection. To be in Him is also to love the Father, since it is to be in union with the only heart that loves supremely and perfectly.
Is not the occasion of much of our distrust and darkness to be found in the fact that we estimate ourselves by ourselves, “according to the measure of a man,” instead of according to the measure of Christ.’’ He is the true exponent of our standing before God. “As He is, so are we in this world.” He holds us in Himself, and presents us to the eye of the Father, bright in the shining vestments of his own righteousness, and rich with the dowry of his blood-bought merit. He is not a meditator of one but of two. He not only represents God to us in his own being, “the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person,” but He represents us to God. We see God in Christ God sees us in Christ. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. We in Christ are reconciled unto God. Never can we pray, “O Lord, look Thou upon me; preserve my soul, for / am holy.” More and
1 I John i. 1 8.
more shall we learn to take up and urge, with all the energy of a self-ignoring faith, the cry, “Behold, O God, our Shield, and look upon the face of thine Anointed.” And the evenness of our joy and the stability of our hope depend upon our keeping our gaze fixed immovably upon that one Blessed Object upon which the Father’s gaze is always fixed.
If we measure our hope solely by the clearness with which Christ’s likeness is reflected in our own character and experience, we can find little comfort. For our life is at best but a dim and distorted mirror that can neither hold nor reflect any perfect image. If, forgetting ourselves, we delight only in looking unto Jesus and tracing the lineaments of his divine countenance, we shall not only be ever growing into the same image from glory to glory till we are sanctified; but remembering that God contemplates us even now in that image, we shall be able to rejoice as those that are already justified.
Now, while such words as “justified from all things,” and “no condemnation,” as applied to the believer, establish beyond a question both the fullness and the fixedness of his pardon, do not the great mass of Christians regard it practically as lying along a kind of sliding scale of frames and feelings where it is depressed or elevated according to the feebleness or intensity of our religious comfort; capable of variation, indeed, from the zero point of almost total condemnation to that of full acceptance?
But we cannot forget that as God put the terms of salvation so high that we could not of ourselves make them; so He has put oui title-deeds to salvation so high that we ma) not mar them, having hidden them “with Christ in God.” As “holy Rutherford “says,” Unbelief may perhaps tear the copies of the covenant which Christ hath given you; but He still keeps the original in heaven with Himself. Your doubts and fears are no part of the covenant, neither can they chatige Christy
If Christ is the complete and only reason of our acceptance, must there not be some greater reason for our rejection than our doubts and misgivings? If “in Christ Jesus we who sometime were afar off are made nigh,” will it not take something more than our distrust and despair to remove us far off again, and set us among aliens and strangers?
Let us speak with the deepest reverence on so tender a theme; and put off the shoes of self-confidence from our feet as we tread upon this holy ground, and dwell upon this grace wherein we stand. And yet we may well beware lest God’s faithfulness find us more skeptical than his severity. The deepest sense of unworthiness is nowise inconsistent with the highest confidence in God’s full and perfect justification of us. And we may without contradiction join the confession of a weak faith and much guilty unbelief with the exulting confidence, “If we believe not, yet He abideth faithful; He cannot deny Himself.” 1
We have already spoken of the temptation to reckon our standing with God by our sense of personal worthiness at any given time. But we have only to know that the righteousness of Christ is upon us by our union with Him, to be assured that the approval and blessedness which that righteousness can win for Him, it can win for us.
True, as John Bunyan says,” The righteousness is still in Christ, and not in us, even when we are made partakers of the benefit of
1 2 Tim. ii. 13.
it; even as the wing and feathers still abide in the hen when the chickens are covered, kept, and warmed thereby.” But that they who have put their trust under the shadovi of his wing are covered and kept and warmed, is just what we are urging. Aye, so completely covered, that the storm of a violated law cannot reach them; and so kept, that that wicked one toucheth them not; and so warmed, that no death chill of the penalty of sin can come to them. And it is this fact, that our righteousness is not our own, that makes it possible for us to glory in it, joining to the confession, *’ I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dzvellctJi no good tiling’ that other, “/ knciv a man in Christ, of such an one will I glory T
Is there any more striking illustration of the total change of place and relationship which the Scriptures recognize as having taken place in the believer than is found in Paul’s bold way of dating back to the naturai state as “when we were in the flesh f” To be in Christ is to be in the true Ajtno Domini, from whence we look back and see the whole time past of our lives lived in the flesh now
1 Rom. vii. 18. 2 Cor. xii. i. Rom. vii. 5.
ended at the cross; and then in the risen Christ all begun afresh in perfect blessing and in the power of an endless life.
We sighed for the love of God before, but could find no sense or assurance of it, because we could find nothing in us or upon us which it could approve. But now we see how as risen with Christ we have been borne up into the favor of the Father and into the full fruition of the prayer, *’ that the love wherewith Thou hast loved me may be in them and I hi them’’
We sighed for better desires and a true “hunger and thirst after righteousness.” But God has done better for us than we knew how to ask or think. He has given us both the hunger and its satisfaction, both the new nature from the Lord and that which that nature wants, righteousness in the Lord. The law of entail which made us heirs in Adam of what we most longed to be free from, sin, and death by sin, now holds to make us heirs in Christ of what we most longed to possess, holiness and everlasting life.” As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy, arid as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly!’
And what shall be the influence of these ’
truths upon our daily life? To make us use:
little heed, because we have such a plenitude
of righteousness in Christ, to fulfill righteous-
ness in ourselves? Nay, but do they not
present us with the most powerful motive to;
purity that one can possibly have? In;
Christ our righteousness, we see not what we i are excused from, but what we are pledged to. We understand ourselves only in Him, what we are in God’s esteem, and not the less what we must be in our personal attainment.
In divine things as in common things we j
say that a noble life is impossible without a j noble ideal. But what if that ideal be a holy
Person, and He not One whom we have set before ourselves but One whom we have put
on? Ought we not to say that an unholy
life should be impossible in such a case, since j
the ideal has become more than an incentive, i
it has become the sacred guarantee of an
actual and realized perfection in ourselves y
And this is literally the case. Justifica- j tion pledges a holy life on the part of him
who receives it, just as truly as it pledges i eternal life on the part of Him who gives it.
And much as we rejoice in that gracious decree wherein He has made us “accepted in the Beloved,” we cannot forget that wrapped up in the same decree is that other purpose wherein “He also did predestinate us to be co7ifo7’med to the image of his Son!’ So that it would seem that high views of saintship must tend inevitably to make one intensely eager for high attainments in saintship.
But what if it be said that the dwelling by faith in a position so much above our actually attained one, must end in our dwelling very little among the common every-day duties of practical Ufe? No objection has been more strenuously urged than this. Yet doubtless the common experience of Christians is that it is far more difficult to rise betimes above the conflict and endeavor of hard practical serldce, into the rest of faith and the blessedness of assured justification in Christ, than having so risen to descend again. The Mount of Transfiguration is never so far removed from the plain of daily duty, that a few steps will not suffice to bring us back among the “much people” and within hearing of the 1 28 LV CHRIST.
beseeching cry of those possessed of the evil spirit
And more than this; so far from tending to selfish isolation from the world and indifference to its sorrows, its needs, and its sins, communion with Christ ought to be and must inevitably be, if real, the means of bringing us into the deepest fellowship with human suffering. The righteousness of Christ can never be worn as a mere outer garment, which while it covers the soul neither touches it nor transforms it. Every putting on of the Lord Jesus must result more and more in having that mind in us which was also in Him; and that mind is one which leads to humiliation, even unto death, for the sake of the lost We cannot forget that the same Apostle who rested so absolutely in the righteousness of Christ for his own salvation, that he said,” I count all things but loss that I may win Christ, and be fotmd in Him not having mine own righteousness I’ yet had so much of the mind of Christ respecting the salvation of others, that he said, *’ God is my witness how I long after you all /;/ the tender heart of yesus Christy 1
1 Phil. i. 8.*
We must remember that to be in Christ is not only to be in union with the divine nature, but also, because He is the Son of man as well as the Son of God, it is to be in truest union with human nature. We never get so near the heart of our sorrowing humanity, as when we are in communion with the heart of the man of sorrows. And if we have prayed for a “heart baptized into a sense of all conditions I’ let us know that we shall find the fullest answer to our prayer in realizing that baptism into Christ which we have already received, since” As many as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ, in whom is neither Jew nor Greeks bond nor free, male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus T Because He is the universal man, the man without a country, since belonging alike to all, and the man without exclusive kindredship, since finding his mother and his brethren in whomsoever the will of his Father is obeyed, union with Him must lift us, as nothing else can, above all respect of persons and into universal sympathies. Since, then, Christ is
1 “I prayed to God,” says George Fox, “that lie would baptize my heart into a sense of all conditions, that so I might be able to enter into the needs and sorrows of all.”
2 Gal. ill. 27, 28.
not divided, we, having his righteousness upon ’
us, must have his heart within us. And hav- ’
ing that heart, how shall we not follow whith- j
ersoever it leads, even into all conditions and I
into all needs that belong to our race? ’
And if a sense of his completeness in.
Christ does not beget indifference or selfish-
ness in the believer’s heart, it surely cannot i
engender pride. For is not pride always
some form of self-consciousness? And it is the very reverse of self-consciousness to know
that we are nothing in ourselves, and that all j
our righteousness is in another. Or, to look 1
at the opposite of pride, can true humility flourish except under the shadow of some
overtowering greatness? It is by being in ’
the all-worthy One that we discover as no- j
where else how unworthy we are, because of j
the contrast which we are compelled con- stantly to behold.
Experiment has demonstrated that the most brilliant light which human science can pro- duce, when projected upon the disc of the sun, is literal darkness in comparison. In Christ’s righteousness we discover the worthlessness ’ of our own, — how it not only can add nothing to the lustre of that which is as white as j the light, but would rather tarnish it if it were laid upon it. And so every contemplation of ourselves in the Perfect One must make self-righteousness cover its face, and pride shrink away abashed.
There will however be no fleeing away from the presence of the Lord on this account. With the deepest sense of guilt and unholiness, there will yet be a deathless clinging of the heart to Him whose moral glory has so humbled us. With the profound sense of unfitness to be in his righteousness, there will be connected an inward consciousness that it is the only shelter one can be in and live.
And if no sense of unworthiness can keep us from Jesus, no sense of worthiness ever can. For the Refuge of the sinner must ever also be the Refuge of the saint, — “the strong tower into which the righteous runneth and is safe.”
The Lord may give us many a victory in our upward strivings towards perfection; and He may add daily to our stature as we seek to grow up into Him who is our Head; but when shall we get beyond the deep petition of that hymn which its author so worthily
Styled” a living and dying prayer for the I holiest believer in the world,’’ — ]
*’ Rock of Ages, cleft for me, I
L€t me hide myself in Thee “? j
From our sin and from our righteousness j alike, from our evil deeds and from our good deeds, from the rebukes of an upbraiding conscience and from the flatteries of an easy conscience, we shall ever need to fly unto that name whereby we are called, —” The Lord our Righteousness