Christ in Us: Causes and Effects
Abide in me, and I in you John xv: 3.
UT how does He thus manifest Himself as He does not unto the world? I like to think, beloved, that He Himself brings us into this state. I love to think He does not leave us to chmb up to it alone. He does not build a palace among the hills and say, ‘If you can reach it, it will be a blessed place,” but He brings us right into the palace. Poor Bunyan, when God came to him with conviction of sin, saw in his vision a house of beauty and of blessing, where holy men and women were singing together in the very light of the Lord. But he was outside, and could not get within. It seemed that a barrier of rocks rose between them and him. He saw how happy those people were, and how bright the scene, and how real the joy. But he was out in the dark and cold. And that is the way it seems to some of you. They say, “It is beautiful to live a life like that, where it is constant rest and victory, and where our troubles do not drown us; where the great whirlpool of sin does not draw us in, and we have Christ all the time to bless us and to make us a blessing to others.” Yes, they say it is a blessed way to live, but it is not possible for us to get there. And I sometimes hear teachings that encourage this. I remember a meeting in England one time, where a good man got up and told the people what Christ would do for them if they would only let Him in to do it. “But,’’ he said, “dear friends, you must get prepared for it. You must get cleansed first, or Christ will not come. “I saw those hearts go down, and they said, “Oh, dear, how shall I gt cleansed?” I longed to say, if I had had the opportunity, “Oh, beloved, the holiness is just what Christ Himself waits to give you. How are you to make holiness? Why, the incoming of
Jesus will be the holiness, if you will just open the door. Poor Laodicea, so lukewarm that He feels like spewing you out of His mouth, He says even to you, I will come in if you will open the door!”
CHRIST OUR HOLINESS.
This idea of trying to get a holiness of your own, and then have Christ come to reward you for it, is not His teaching. Oh, no, beloved, Christ is the holiness; He will bring the holiness, and come and dwell in the heart forever. I use this illustration often, and I do not know of a better. I have seen the cabins on the vacant lots in the upper part of the city, where the people have been living in the shanties for half a century. They try to fix them up once in a while. I dare say it is a good deal for one of those poor washerwomen to spend ten’’ dollars to clean up and put whitewash on the walls, and she feels she has made it quite decent and respectable. That is the way we are trying to do. Now when one of the
New York millionaires purchases that lot, he does not fix up the old shanty, but he gets a second-hand man, if he will have it, to tear it down, and he puts a mansion in its place. It is not fixing up the house that you need, but to give Christ the vacant lot, and He will excavate below our old life and build a house where He will live forever. Now that is what I mean when I say that Christ will be the preparation for the blessing, and make way for His own approach. It is as when a great Assyrian king used to set out on a march. He did not command the people to make a road, but he sent on his own men, and they cut down the trees, and filled the broken places, and leveled the mountains. So He will if we let Him be the coming King, the Author and Finisher of our faith.
OUR DEATH.
This was very sweetly expressed in the words of a Christian who told me that Christ had said to her, ^^I will be thy death, and I will then be thy life. *’ Do not try to be your own death. Take Christ to be the death. Oh, I know there are a hundred men and women here to-day, that would just rise a million leagues higher if they could grasp the truth. Your life would be as different from the present as that is from your sinful life. If you would grasp the thought that in the things you are trying to root up, cast away, crucify, Christ will strongly, sweetly, completely undertake and finish that very work; and that you will not need any longer to stand in the dissecting room above your abominable corpse, trying to cut it to pieces, or to tremble with the knife of the suicide, trying to stab yourself. Oh, beloved, you can be done with all that torture. You can trust Him to be the power to slay you, while you stand and look on. The only thing you have to do is just bravely to hand over yourself to-day; to put your hand on your will and say, ‘Here is the culprit. Lord; I deliver him over to you. I cannot slay him. I want him killed. I want you to take these throbbing billows of passion.
and still them and let peace come instead. I cannot do it; when I try it strangles me; it is like fighting the tigers of the jungle. But I give thee the right to slay it in thine own way, and here once and forever more, I yield him to thee. I will not want him saved again. I will never sympathize again. But, 0 Lord, it is all right. Do it in your way.” And if you keep looking to Him, He will do it. Then He puts aside the old life so there will be room for His life. It must be so. The reason He has not come to you is, that you would not let Him do this. But praise His name! the Spirit will wrestle against the flesh. Make this surrender, and let Christ come in in victory.
OUR LIFE AND PURITY.
Again: Christ will not only be the death of self, and the power to put your old self aside by His Spirit and grace, but He will be in you the new Ufe and power of your soul. He will cleanse you, and let you share His life in you. It is not possible to explain this to one who does not know anything at all of it. But there is such a sense of its being a life that does not belong to you. When we thus receive Christ, there is no sense of elevation, of pride, or of our own goodness; but we feel like lying in the dust, and saying, “I am nothing but the chief of sinners.” But at the same time we are conscious that a blessed stream of purity is flowing through every avenue of our being. We are just as conscious of this as if a stream from the throne were pouring its waters over all our senses and life. When temptation comes He meets it by the blessed supply of His life and Spirit, and you are lifted above; the positive destroys the negative; the heavenly repels the earthly and the evil. It is just the same as when on one of these hot summer days, going over the deserts of the West, suddenly the soft spring showers fell, and in a few moments we were conscious that everything was cleansed and purified. The grass was fresh and green. The flowers lifted up their heads with beauty and freshness. The air was full of hf e, and the sweet f ragance of nature filled the senses. So it is when the holiness of Christ comes to refresh the weary, sinful heart. He will do it for you; and you can so walk in Him, that His presence will be evermore like those showers, dropping upon your spirit and cleansing you from the very dust of the defiling earth.
That is what Christ will be in us. He will be our purity. He will keep us holy — washed like the pebble by the stream and kept clean in its flow.
OUR PEACE.
And again: He is not only our death and our life, but He becomes our peace. You read much of this in the Gospels, especially in these chapters of John. “My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” One of the chief features of this life of Christ within us is that there will be tranquillity; our natural turbulence and quickness of irritation, or of determination will be stilled. We shall be conscious of being self -poised, or rather Christ poised, and there will be a sense of calm strength about our life. Instead of our dashing and storming through life, we will be divinely quiet, because down in the depths of life we shall be conscious of the peace of God that passeth all understanding, that is keeping our hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, and we shall be careful for nothing. Beloved, is it thus with you? Does Christ thus come into the inner chambers of your heart, and although there may be turbulence and tribulation outside, whisper: ’ ‘In me ye shall have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but in me ye shall have peace. Be of good cheer, I ha e overcome the world?” Beloved, have you this peace! It is His peace. In yourselves have you not tried, until the very blood started from the lips between the clenched teeth, until you sank faint from the effort? But it did not hold you still. I have tried to hold myself until I felt if I tried another moment, I should die from the exertion. But here, it is the peace of Christ that keeps, or as it is in the Greek, ‘garrisons the heart.”
OUR JOY.
And then this indwelling Christ is more than peace. He is also joy. “That my joy might be fulfilled in you; and that your joy might be full.” Well, that is pretty strong language. ‘’These things,” he says, ‘’Have I written, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”
His joy was unutterable. It may be fulfilled in you. It is the joy of the Lord in your heart. One of the old prophets saw it in the distance, and used this exquisite poetic language: “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty.” Zephaniah had got hold of this thought, God in the midst of thee, “He will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love; he will joy over thee with singing.” He will be silent with love. In your hearts He will sometimes hold the tides of joy so calm and still, that you will be afraid to stir for fear you break the spell. And then they will sweep through all the channels of your being. Alternately He will rest, and then break out in transports of joy. The peace is abiding; ‘the joy is occasional. When we need to have some terrible trial counteracted, or rise above some earthly disaster, then it is that the fountains come with their overflow. It came to Paul and Silas when their bones were aching, and they were sore from the stripes, and they were down in that prison. They could not keep it back. They sang their joy. It came to them when the men of Antioch had stoned them out of the city, and they were outraged and abused, and humiliated. Then there came another of these spring- tides of joy and they were filled with joy and the Holy Ghost. It came to the martyrs when they were roasting at slow fires, and they turned to their persecutors and said: “We do not feel the fires, the joy is so great; it fills our being and cancels the pain.” It was the Spirit of Him who on the eve of the cross, turned from His own troubles, began to comfort them, and said: Let not your heart be troubled.’’ Oh, dear friends, all you need to have music, even in the night, is to get the nightingale in the house. You do not need to learn to sing the nightingale’s song, but just bring it in with its song.
OUR FAITH.
Christ in us will be our faith. We will be able to say, The life I now live is by the faith of the Son of God.” When you have this faith it will be natural to believe God. You will be conscious of a supernatural faith, and you will be surprised how the faith takes hold. It is not your trying to have faith, it is taking Christ into your heart. If He is in your heart, He will live in you with His own life.
OUR LOVE.
Again: the love of God will be shed abroad in your heart; not the love of your heart.
but the love of God. If Christ is in you, you will sometimes be conscious of a strange love for Christ, and know that it is not your love but His. You have been conscious of a hard and cold nature, and of such an indifference that you felt you could have jeered like those wicked men who mocked Him. But it is Christ’s own love. If you take Jesus in thus, it will be a delight to love Him and to love God. And you will have new loves and friendships to all men, loving in and for Him only.
OUR WISDOM.
Again: if we have this indwelling Christ, He will be our wisdom. He will in some way touch our very thoughts. He will enter into our conceptions of truth, and make us feel, “I cannot even grasp this truth, but Christ spreads it before me by His own higher knowledge.” You will have His intuitions about. the things you ought to do, or His holding you back from that which He would not have you do; and all in perfect harmony with your nature; so blended with the faculties He has given you, that the thoughts and impulses will seem to be your own.
OUR POWER.
He will be your power. He will be the strength of God in you. Paul says, ‘^I labor according to His working, which worketh in me mightily.” So it will not be your doing, but Christ enabhng you, Christ giving you power to work for others, and for the effectual building up of His kingdom. It is God’s very power; the power of Pentecost; the power, not of your experience, but the conscious presence of the Mighty One in you, so that, while you are a weak woman, or an imperfectly educated man, you will be so filled with the consciousness, “I am speaking in the strength of God,” that you will know the word of God shall not return to Him void.
It is blessed to work and speak and* pray in the power of Christ. And it is mockery, and worse than vain, to attempt it without.
Christ will be your power, “A11 power is given unto me in heaven and in earth, and lo! I am with you alway.”
OUR PRAYER.
Again, Christ in you will be your prayer. He will intercede within you. And there will be sometimes the strong groaning and tears of His own Gethsemane, and again the effectual prayer that claims all things in His name.
OUR PRAISE.
Again, He will be your praise, as well as your prayer. He will come to the heart after it has presented its petition, and touch it with the voice of thanksgiving, enabling you to bless God for the answer that is coming.
OUR HEALTH.
Again, if Christ is in your heart. He will be your physical strength and life. He will inspire your lital functions with energy, and make you know the life of Christ made manifest in your mortal flesh.
OUR PATIENCE
Again, if Christ be in you He will be your patience. One large part of Christ’s life was suffering; so a large part of yours will be suffering with Him. That cross will also rest upon the Mount Calvary of your life, and you will gladly share it with Him; not suffering needlessly, not suffering to please the enemy, but suffering that kind of sorrow that is turned into cups of cold water for others, that helps to carry their burdens, that takes the needs of others and bears them through places where they would sink, that helps Him bear His heavy load for the suffering hearts of the world. And when it comes, as it came to Him, from opposing men and devils, then He will enable you to become more than conquerors.
When I was in Scotland I went a long way out of my path to visit the city of Stirling. Having only a short time to stay, I went at once to the spot I sought — the old cemetery — and, as I gazed upon that gray monument, looking back through the mist
CHRIST IN tJS. Yl
of years, it brought to my mind the story of the Covenanters. It was the monument of Margaret Wilson. It told how that dear young saint, that girl in her teens, held so to her love of Jesus that the pleadings of father and mother and friends kept her not back from death. “Only one little word, Margaret, one little word, and your life shall be spared,” they said. “I canna speak the word the word that shall dishonor Jesus,” she replied. Remember your father’s grief,” he begged the night before she died. She stroked his gray hairs, and said, “I canna speak the words you bid me speak.” And then the next morning they took her out, those rude and hard men, and tied her to the stake and put it in the sea. And they tied another to a stake, a gray-haired old saint, and they put her a little farther out in the wild sea, so that Margaret Wilson could first see her die. And they said, ‘Margaret Wilson, if you speak that word you shall be free.’’ And then they left her to the billows of the rising sea. Nearer and nearer they came to the aged martyr; they reached her waist, they reached her shoulders, they swept her face, but she stood there with her countenance hf ted to heaven. And they said, ^’Margaret Wilson, don’t you see her? Won’t you still recant?” And she said, ‘’No; I do not see her; I only see Jesus Christ in His suffering servant wrestling there;” and as she lifted her eyes the chariot of the Lord was waiting to bear the martyr home. That is our watchword, ‘’Christ in one of His members suffering there; not I, but Christ.” Thus can we overcome; thus can we live; thus can we suffer. Oh, let Him be our power to suffer, and to overcome even sorrow itself through His name!
OUR WILL.
Another and last thought: If Christ be thus in us. He will be in the hardest part of our being, our will. This is the helm of character. But Christ will take the will and bend it until it shall be no longer stubborn. He shall make it yield to His will and bend to what He choses. He will make it delightfully spontaneous. When I was a little fellow I used to make my own sled runners, and I used to break piece after piece. But one day a carpenter told me there was a better way. I took it to him, and he put it in the steam boiler, and then it would bend any way. Christ does not want to break your will, but He wants to put it in the fire of His love, and work in you to will and to do of His good pleasure. And then He will take it and make it strong. When I got my little runner bent, the carpenter showed how to make it so firm that it would not go back again. So Christ can make your will like adamant. He can set your face like a flint. He can put in your heart that which shall make you like a rock. May He show you how simple and complete is His provision for all this! He will show it. He will do it. Is there a hard heart here this morning longing for it? God expected you to fail. God is not chiding you for failing. God is not standing by you this morning taking any pleasure in it. He knew that, like all His self-confident children, you would betray Him in the hour of temptation. He let it come that He might give you something better, that He might lift you into His way. And now He is able to keep you from stumbling. He is able to present you faultless before His presence with exceeding joy. Let me plead with you, let Christ plead with you, that He may be your strength. Go to Him this moment, and do not leave your knees until you can say, ‘He is for me. He is in me, and I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me.”