Galatians 2:20. Christ liveth in me.
Here is a marvellous thing, calling for thoughtful examination, and surely worthy of it. “Christ liveth in me”, says Paul.
Is this a highly figurative statement, or has it actual reality to rest upon? Is it really true that the believer can have solid grounds for saying, “Christ liveth in me”? Glorious things are spoken of the people of God, but few things could be said of them more glorious than that Christ – God manifest in the flesh – lives in them. Is this marvellous assertion the high-wrought utterance of religious mysticism, or is it the simple expression a spiritual fact?
We may observe that the text is far from being a solitary or unparalleled statement in the Word of God. The truth contained in it is even declared to lie at the foundation of all personal and living Christianity: “Examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?”
To convey this astonishing privilege, of having Christ living in us, is the great end for which the gospel ministry is established and exercised: “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you, I desire to be present with you now, and to change my voice; for I stand in doubt of you”. The appearance of this great marvel among the Gentiles is “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to [God’s] saints, 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”. It is the great object which Jesus seeks to obtain when He knocks, by His gospel and His Spirit, on the hearts of sinners: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him”.
It is the realisation of the great covenant promise: “Ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people”. It is the object for which believers are commanded to abide in Christ: “Abide in Me, and I in you”. It is the scope of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians: “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith”. Indeed it is the grand and ultimate aim of Christ’s own intercession; the utmost and terminal desire of His heart, as expressed unto the Father on their behalf; the resting place of His heart concerning them, where He sees of the travail of His soul and is satisfied; for even thus does His intercessory prayer for them terminate: “That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them“.
But in none of these statements, confirmatory and parallel to the text as they evidently are, is the great truth set forth so simply and emphatically as in the text itself: “Christ liveth in Me”. We propose to consider (1) the causes and (2) the consequences of Christ living in the believer. The rich meaning and significance of this truth may thus in a measure open up to us, while its intense and glorious literality will become manifest.
1Taken with editing from The Family Treasury for 1859.
1. The causes of Christ living in the believer.
How does this marvellous fact actually come about? To what causes can it be assigned?
(1.) The great leading cause is the Holy Spirit.
This great effect is to be attributed to Him – to the operation and indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Regeneration, which is the Spirit’s work, is the implantation in a soul, formerly dead in trespasses and sins, of a new life, a vital principle of holiness. The will is renewed; and from being ungodly and at enmity to God, it is turned to choose God, satisfying itself with Him as its supreme good, subjecting itself to Him as its Sovereign Lord. This is a new life – spiritual, Godward, altogether new, a new creature. With this new principle of life, this new creation in the soul, the Spirit of God, who is the author of it, maintains a vital and uninterrupted connection, thereby dwelling in the believer henceforth as in a living temple. It is in virtue of this in-dwelling, this in-living of the Spirit, that Christ lives in us. For, in all this, the Spirit acts as the Spirit of Christ. For “if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His”. “And hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us.”
Christ, as God the Son, is of one substance, power and eternity with God the Holy Spirit. Christ also, as the Son of man, had the Spirit bestowed on Him without measure. His human nature was formed, in body and soul, and sanctified from the first, by the special operation of the Spirit. He was anointed with the immeasurable fullness of the Spirit. By the light of the Spirit, the Man Christ Jesus thought all His thoughts; by the grace of the Spirit, He willed all His purposes; by the strength of the Spirit He wrought all His works; till finally He, “through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God,” thereafter rising from the dead by the Spirit of holiness, and ascending to pour out that Spirit of truth and consolations which He had promised so graciously to His disciples. In His Godhead, the Lord Jesus is one with the Spirit; and as man, by the Spirit He was what He was.
When Christ therefore sends His Spirit – not to speak of Himself, but to take of what is Christ’s and show it unto us; to create us again in Christ and like Christ; to dwell in us as in a living temple, as ourselves living spirits to which He has given a new and Christ-like life – can we fail to see that there is something here which in no respect falls short even of the great marvel of our text, Christ living in us? Christ, the eternal Son, lives in us when the Spirit lives in us; for the Spirit and the Son with the Father are inseparable in their joint possession of the all-fullness of the Godhead. And Christ, as God-man, the Son of man, the very Christ that tabernacled with men upon the earth, lives in us, when the Spirit living in us confines Himself to revealing Christ as the God-man, whose glory His disciples saw in human flesh, as the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
It is as the agent and ambassador of the God-man that the Spirit is given in the Church; it is the God-man whom the Spirit reveals and glorifies in the Church; it is within the limits of what He Himself revealed and wrought in the God-man that He restricts Himself in working in the Church, or body of the faithful. He lives in them as He lived in Him. He works to reveal in them progressively the truth which He implanted and developed in unclouded spiritual splendour in the mind of the Man Christ Jesus; to establish in them progressively the grace with which He replenished the heart of the Man Christ Jesus – to conform them, in a word, to the “First-born of many brethren”.
And how then can His in-dwelling, in-working, in-living in them be other than most adequately expressed by the doctrine that “Christ liveth in” them? Christ, by His Spirit, lives in them. By His Spirit He quickens them to new and spiritual life; and by His Spirit He takes possession of them as His living temple. As a living temple, He always regards them and acts in them. Their faculties as living men – alive from the dead – He animates and controls. Whatever in their thoughts, affections, purposes, actions, is opposed to His own, He sets Himself to suppress; and He undertakes to sanctify the faculties themselves – to form, mould and guide into harmony with His own. Indeed their whole character, their very natures, as living men – spiritually living – He works by His Spirit to assimilate unto His own. As this work advances, the very thoughts that He thinks they think; the affections He entertains they entertain; the purposes of His mind are theirs also; His work is their work; His nature theirs.
And up to the limit to which this blessed result has in its onward progress been achieved, how can a better, a briefer, a more perfect expression be found for it than to say that, to this extent, “Christ liveth in” them? It is then, literally, profoundly true that Christ lives in His people. He lives in them by His Spirit which He has given them.
(2.) Another cause, holding indeed a different but indispensable place, is the gospel.
We know nothing of Christ except as He is revealed in the Word — “the word of the truth of the gospel”. God is manifest in the Man Christ Jesus — the invisible, inaccessible Godhead is brought near and manifested in Christ; but it is in the gospel that the manifestation is given. Take away the gospel, and you take away Christ. He has bound Himself inseparably to His gospel in all His dispensations to the sons of men. He has seated Himself in the chariot of His gospel, and all His goings forth have been, and to the end of time will be, as seated there. He has clothed Himself with His own gospel, and in these robes alone does He appear in His Church below. He that is blind to the gospel is blind to Christ. He that does not believe the gospel does not believe on Christ; he that rejects the gospel, it is Christ whom he is rejecting. When we receive Christ, it is by the heart, it is into the heart, that we receive Him; but we can in this life receive Him only as He is offered to us in the gospel.
When therefore another gospel was preached in the Church at Galatia, Paul felt that the Christ in them was endangered: “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you”. When to the Church at Colosse he spoke of Christ in them the hope of glory — knowing that only by means of the gospel could Christ be in them — he added, “Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man”. If His Word dwells in you, Christ dwells in you. “Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father.” And if you continue in the Son, He continues in you, according to the sacred oracle, “Abide in Me, and I in you”.
(3.) Another cause, holding a different place, but equally indispensable, is faith.
The place and operation of faith in this matter are attested emphatically by Paul in his prayer, for the Ephesians: “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith”. The new life which the Spirit gives, in regeneration, acts, in all its operations, by faith. All its goings forth and its energies are in the acting of faith. And it is this that reconciles Paul’s apparent contradiction: that he himself lives and yet it is Christ that lives in him; bringing it about that while he himself lives, and Christ lives in him, these are not two lives but one. It is by faith that they are really one.
“I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Does Paul then retract the assertion, “I live”, by saying, “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me?” Does he deny that he lives, by declaring that Christ lives in him? No, he asserts it; he reasserts it; for he goes on to say, “And the life that I now live in the flesh”. And how does he make these two lives to be really one? Why, “the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, [even Him] who loved me, and gave Himself for me”. By the faith of Him I live on Him; I live His life; He lives in me by faith. By faith I receive, I retain the living Christ – living in me; Christ my life. By faith I live the life which Christ lives in me.
Mark also very specially that it is by faith in a dying Christ that Christ lives in His people. It might have been supposed that it must be by faith in a living Christ that He should live in us; but it is not so. It is by faith in a dying Christ. “I live by the faith of the Son of God”, says Paul. Be it so. But under what view of Christ – in what aspect of Christ’s relation to you and His work for you – do you exercise your faith in Him? “Who loved me, and gave Himself for me,” is Paul’s answer. It is as loving him and dying for him that Paul exercises faith in Christ, in order that Christ may live in him. Indeed this singular verse, with its rich, unfathomable wonders, both begins and closes with this truth: that He lives in His people by faith’s communion with a crucified, dying Saviour, their Substitute: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me”.
It is this great truth that the Lord Himself sets forth in His startling discourse about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. For it is faith’s participation in His sacrifice of Himself in death, in the wounding of His flesh and the shedding of His blood that He is describing: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.” Then He comes nearer to the doctrine before us: “He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him”. And at last He exactly states the matter: “As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me”.
The Apostle Paul also, in writing to the Corinthians, puts this truth in a very beautiful light – the truth, I mean, that it is by faith in a dying Saviour that the Saviour lives in us – when he says, “Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body”. If I would have Christ living in me, I must be crucified with Christ; if I would have Christ living in me, it must be by the exercise of faith in Christ dying for me.
Nor is this mysterious. If I would have life reigning in me, I have a prior death that reigns in me to dispose of. I have a judicial death, a death in the anger of God – a wrathful but righteous sentence of death – barring me from all life and blessing. It also strengthens and rivets in me the dominion of spiritual death – my death in trespasses and sins. I must therefore find a life that shall suppress my death and that shall not itself die in doing so – that shall not expire in the effort, but shall conquer and live on – the true and only life everlasting. Such a life is Christ’s death. Marvel not at this. Christ’s death is vital; Christ’s death is life; Christ’s death is life eternal, swallowing up death in victory – suppressing my death and living for me and in me – eternal life still. The life that I need is a life that can live in the midst of death, seeing that I am dead – dead under the law of God, and dead in trespasses and sins. Show me Eternal Life made under the law of God and giving itself in death for my trespasses and sins. Show me a life in the midst of death, if you would show me a life that can live in me.
A singular demand, but one that is exactly met in Christ, the Living One – the Life, giving Himself a sacrifice in death for me, and living still – living in the inviolable depths of His Divine Person. He is never more living than when actively and livingly giving Himself in death for me – laying down His human life so that He might, in the unabated life and living energy of His Divine Person, and in the legal triumph of His mediatorial office, after the power of an endless life which His death never for a moment interrupted – resume that human life once more.
Give me that death of Christ in which, even when dying, He lived and conquered – that death of Christ in which through death He destroyed him that had the power of death. That death of Christ, far from extinguishing the life which He brought from heaven to me, only broke open for me that “fountain of life” (Ps 36:9) in His Godhead, which had otherwise been for ever sealed and inaccessible, till there poured forth from it a “river of the water of life” sweeping away and swallowing up death in victory. Give me that death of the Prince of Life. It is a vital death; it is a real life; it is the very life for me; for it is the life which can live in death – the only life that can live in me. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live. If I would have Christ living in me, it must be by faith in Christ dying for me. The life which I now live in the flesh I must “live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me”.
Apart from Christ, what am I, and what is my position or place? I am shut up within the gates of death. And apart from me, what is Christ? He is “the Life” – Life eternal and inviolable – no death in His lot at all. What then is Christ’s death, if in redeeming love He dies for me, if He gives Himself as a substitute, a sacrifice in death for me, if He comes into my place and dies for me? What have I here but Eternal Life bursting open the gates of death and coming in to identify Himself with me? And as He bursts them open and comes in, do they close again and imprison both Him and me? Is the Fountain of life, is Godhead in the Man Christ Jesus, the prey and prisoner of death? God forbid. He is not death’s prisoner; He is death’s plagues and death’s destruction. He has come to me, not in the suppression, but in the unabated energy and in the glorious triumph, of His character and power as the Life Eternal; His triumph being this: that in dying He has burst the gates of death. Christ crucified is the only life that could ever find its way into me, and has done so by dying for me.
Yes, give me life in the midst of death, if you would give me a life that will suffice for me. The cross alone meets my demand. For this is the marvel of the cross and of the decease accomplished there. It is Life in the midst of death. Not Life extinguished in death, and by death. But Life living in death: Life living death down; Life, by being crucified, crucifying death dead. I am crucified with this Life. No wonder therefore if “nevertheless I live”.
Therefore always as I would have Christ live in me more and more, let me have communion more and more with Christ dying for me. For thus only the death that is always rising up over me, to claim me, through the sin that is always dwelling in me – for sin rises up in me, and death by sin – thus only is that ever-rising death suppressed and set aside, even by my faith ever bringing in the death of Christ for me. For if by sin being ever in me, death enters by sin, by faith there ever enters also death for sin – Christ’s perfect death, always conquering death and always giving life to me.
Only by bearing about in the body the death of Jesus can the life also of Jesus be made manifest in my mortal body. Only as Christ crucified does Christ live in His people. Only as always crucified with Christ do I continue to live. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. I not only get my life, I live it, by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me. Not only as Christ crucified does He come into my soul, it is as Christ crucified that He dwells and lives there. Faith in Christ dying for me is the means whereby Christ lives in me.
Such then are the means and causes by which Christ lives in His people – the Spirit, the gospel, faith, – the Spirit working faith in us by the gospel. Christ as revealed in the gospel, and in it apprehended by faith, comes into His people’s hearts by His Spirit, and there He dwells and lives.
The sum of the gospel is this, that all who, by true repentance and faith, do forsake the flesh, the world and the devil, and give themselves up to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as their creator, the redeemer and sanctifier, shall find God as a father taking them for His reconciled children, and for Christ’s sake pardoning their sin, and by His Spirit giving them His grace; and, if they persevere in this course, will finally glorify them and bestow upon them everlasting happiness; but will condemn the unbelievers, impenitent and ungodly to everlasting punishment.
Thomas Manton