Identified with Christ

“That I may know Him” (Phil. iii. io, n).

And this is knowledge of an advanced and matured kind. Paul is not to be satisfied with matriculation, he must take his degree with honours. He will not settle down among the rudiments content with the bare outlines of spiritual attainment, he must pass from stage to stage, through veil after veil, deeper and deeper into the marvellous arcana of the grace and love of God. That should be the characteristic ardour of the Christian. But the trouble is that so many of us get into the first standard and there we remain, because we have no passionate desire to pass into the second. We do not “grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” And so we grow old in years, but we are wearing the

mental and spiritual garments of childhood.

If I may write it reverently we must appear as pathetically grotesque to those “who look with other eyes than ours,” as a full-grown man would look to us if he were wearing the habits of a little child. Our conceptions of the Lord are no bigger than they were when first we met Him. Our sympathies are no richer, no more comprehensive. Our prayers have not increased in grasp and range. We are “just where we were.” We are pitiable specimens of “arrested growth.” But here is Paul, with an eagerness for spiritual knowledge which bears him along from “grace to grace,” “from strength to strength,” and “from glory unto glory.” Every new discovery awakens new wonder, and every new wonder intensifies the ardour of his quest. Every day brings its own surprise, while every day there stretches before him the untraversed continents of “the unsearchable riches of Christ.”

“And the power of His resurrection.” And this, too, he would know in Christ. Many people can recount the evidences for the resurrection who are strangers to its power. They know the facts of history, but the facts have no corroboration in personal experience. They have no doubts about the sunshine, but they have no intimacy with its fertilising warmth. They do not doubt “that Jesus rose again,” but they have not “set to their seal that it is true.” Now Paul was passionately keen to know not only the fact but the power of the fact. He recognised that in the resurrection of Jesus amazing forces were at work, and that if he could only come into the sweep of their tremendous current he would be uplifted in their strength, and all deadly imprisoning cerements would be left behind. If he could only become one with the Man who snapped the bars of death, and walked out of the tomb, then no grave should ever hold him, no matter whether the bondage were of moral or material corruption. His own dynamic of renewal must be found in the power of the resurrection of his Lord. And so all minor ministries were assigned their own subordinate place — the petty forces of wealth, of culture, of friendship — and he esteemed all things but loss that he might become united with the superlative power of God, “which worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead.”

“And the fellowship of His sufferings.” That is a phase of the Apostle’s ambition which may well make us wonder. We can understand the intensity of his desire to experience the power of his Saviour’s resurrection; but is it not strange that he should be equally eager to become intimate with his Master’s pangs as well as with His triumph? Ah, but the share in the triumph is impossible without some share in the pang. No one can “enter into the joy of the Lord,” who has not also been with Him in His temptations. When the sons of Zebedee’s children asked, “that they might sit, one on His right hand, and the other on His left, in His kingdom,” the Lord made this apparently cold and ungracious reply: — “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I drink of?” And yet the reply was full of light and grace. We must share the cup if we would share the throne. We must share the ploughing and the sowing if we would really share in the song of the harvest-home. We must “go out after that which is lost,” if we would deeply rejoice with Him when the lost one has been found. We must taste the bitterness if we would also taste the exquisite sweetness. And so the Apostle is ambitious to know “the fellowship of His sufferings.” He would go with Him down the dark lanes, and into the chill, lonely places of Gethsemane, and climb some little way up the slopes of Calvary, if perchance he might the better appreciate the light and warmth and glory of the resurrection morning.

“Becoming conformable unto ‘His death.” Here is the deep, innermost secret of the mystery of personal identification with the Lord. We can so merge ourselves in Christ, so “know him,” “so become one with Him,” as to be incorporated into the virtues of His unspeakable sacrifice and death. We need not be daunted and distressed by our inability to trace the lines of the mystery, and because our eyes cannot peer far into the darkness. To become one with Christ, by the abiding attitude of faith, and by the unbroken mood of surrender to His will, is to become identified with all that He is, and therefore with all that He did, and therefore with all that He shall do in ages yet to come. Our union with Him shall include the wealth of its inheritance, the energy and the efficiency of His sacrifice, and we shall manifest the incorporation by reflecting in our own degree a gracious willingness to give our lives in seeking the redemption of His brethren. “Becoming conformable unto His death, if by any means I might attain also unto the resurrection of the dead.” One with Him in the likeness of His death, one with Him in the likeness of His resurrection.